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AMERICAN PATRIOTISM 



BOOKS BY HUGO MUNSTERBERG 



Psychology and Life, Boston, 1899 

Grandzilge cer Psychoiogie, Leipzig, 1900 

American Trai-s. Boston, 1902 

Die Amerlkaner. Berlin^ 1904 

Principles of Art Education, New York, 1905 

The Eternal Life, Boston. 1905 

Science and Idealism, Boston, 1906 

Philosophic der Werte, Leipzig, 1907 

On the Witness Stand, New York, 1908 

Aus Deutsch- America, Berlin, 1908 

The Eterna^ Values, Boston, 1909 

Psychotherapy. New York, 1909 

Psychology and the Teacher, New York, 191c 

American Problems, New York, [910 

Psychoiogie ur.d WirtscharVeben, Berlin, 191 2 

Vocarlon and Learning. St Louis. 191 2 

Psychology and Industrial Emeiency, Boston, 191 3 

American Patriotism, New York, 191 5 



AMERICAN PATRIOTISM 

AND 
OTHER SOCIAL STUDIES 



BY 

HUGO MUNSTERBERG 




NEW YORK 

MOFFAT, YARD AND COMPANY 

1913 



ACS 



Copyright, 1913, by 

MOFFAT, YARD AND COMPANY 

New York 

All Rights Reserved 



G%P< 



V^ 



©CI.A346537 



gin 
HUGO REISINGER 



CONTENTS 

CHAPTER PAGE 

i. American Patriotism ........ 3 

2. The Educational Unrest 25 

3. The Case of the Reporter 61 

4. The Germany of To-day 83 

5. The German Woman 119 

6. Coeducation 149 

7. Household Sciences 169 

8. The Germans at School 193 

9. Psychology and the Navy .. 225 



AMERICAN PATRIOTISM 



AMERICAN PATRIOTISM 

WHEN Harvard University had sent me abroad 
for a year as Exchange Professor to lecture in 
Berlin on psychology and philosophy, I always felt 
that I should not be living up to the real meaning of 
my mission if I did not do my best also to spread on 
the European continent reasonable ideas about true 
Americanism. Indeed plenty of absurd ideas prevail 
there. Hence whenever associations or universities 
abroad invited me to give general addresses, I laid 
aside my psychology and philosophy and preached 
America. I tried to overcome prejudices and to fos- 
ter healthy sympathy. I spoke of American progress 
and achievements, of American art and literature, of 
American education and scholarship, as well as of my 
favorite topic, the American woman; and whenever a 
trump was needed, I became enthusiastic over American 
patriotism. 

I believe sincerely that no European country knows 
a patriotism of such fervor and explosiveness. The 
foreigner who approaches the land gets a foretaste on 
shipboard. He may have heard the " Marseillaise," or 
" God Save the King," or " Deutschland, Deutsch- 

3 



4 AMERICAN PATRIOTISM 

land iiber Alles," or the " Russian Hymn," sung by 
deeply devoted masses; but when at the captain's din- 
ner on the steamer the band plays Dixie, a frenzy breaks 
into the feast such as he has never seen in the Old 
World. There is something jubilant and something 
final in American patriotism, and every outsider must 
feel what a tremendous power for the good of the 
country is generated by such triumphant confidence. 

There is indeed nothing nobler than patriotism, if 
it is well understood. It means the unflinching belief 
that our country has a mission of its own, that the 
nation can do something in the world which no other 
people on the globe can do in exactly the same way and 
that we are willing to give our best in order that this 
unique purpose be nobly fulfilled. Patriotism does 
not demand ill feeling toward our neighbors or lack of 
respect for anyone or an air of superiority. It stands 
in sharp contrast only to the flabby cosmopolitanism 
which believes that a vague ideal of general humanity 
makes all the boundary lines of nations rather super- 
fluous. Patriotism is the zeal to help in working out 
the characteristic, individual tendency of one's own na- 
tion, so that it can play its unique role. The last few 
decades have been filled with such patriotic striving 
all over the earth. The idea of nationality has forced 
itself to the foreground with unprecedented energy in 
the last half century. After the small, weak German 



AMERICAN PATRIOTISM 5j 

and Italian states were united into the new Germany 
and the new Italy, with all the strength of the new 
unity grew a splendid patriotism which asserted the 
rights and the hopes of the German and the Italian 
nations. When Japan became aware of its power, 
when China awoke, when Russia felt its wounds heal- 
ing, new patriotic inspirations filled the world, and the 
tremendous force of old England and the glory of 
chivalrous France have never lacked the splendor of 
the patriotic emotion. Everywhere this belief in the 
world task of compatriots became the yeast in the na- 
tions. It gave rise to every memorable achieve- 
ment. 

Yet no other nation has so much needed high-strung 
patriotic emotion for the fulfilment of its mission as 
America. None has combined such a number of dif- 
ferent races and naturally divergent elements. Only a 
passionate patriotism could hold them together to 
secure a unity of convictions and actions. None has 
had to work out its destiny on such a gigantic area, 
with such intense contrasts of local conditions, of eco- 
nomic demands and of cultural level. Only an un- 
questioning patriotism could make the millions forget 
their provincialisms and weld them into a world 
power; but, whatever the social necessities for this na- 
tional over-emotion may have been, it stands out as 
an inspiring symptom of American idealism. A peo- 



6 AMERICAN PATRIOTISM 

pie that loves its country with such exuberance must 
have a heart and a mind open to anything for which 
enthusiasm may be worth while. 

When I spoke in Europe this was the whole of my 
story. I did not care to add there that a dispropor- 
tionate part of this fine American patriotism draws its 
strength from a glaring ignorance of the rest of the 
world. This instinctive feeling has never impressed 
itself so strongly upon me as since my return. The 
typical American does not know and does not care to 
know Europe, with the exception of England, the 
" mother country." To be sure, it may be granted 
that a high-strung patriotism in days of conflicts and 
excitement demands a certain unfair prejudice against 
all other lands. "My country, right or wrong!" 
ought to remain superior to all others; but happily 
there is no struggle and no excitement now, and the 
quiet days rather invite fairness and expansive interest. 

There was also once a time when the Americans 
naturally took an unfriendly attitude toward the older 
nations as a kind of defense against their ill-tempered 
haughtiness. But that belongs to a distant past — for 
a long while the great nations have welcomed the 
United States as an equal and have held open to her a 
place in the front rank. The American ignorance as 
to Europe which prevails to-day is simply carelessness 
and a poor habit, like bad spelling or shiftless a ri thine- 



AMERICAN PATRIOTISM 7 

tic. For most Americans, the ignorant indifference as 
to Europe no longer grows from their prejudices; the 
prejudices grow from their indifference. They do not 
take any trouble to inform themselves. If they know 
their own country and reserve for England a certain 
respectful interest, they feel that everything is all right. 
Too few begin to feel that such a platform of the 
modern Know-Nothing party is, after all, impossible 
at a time when the United States has become a world 
power, the serious needs of which demand most subtle 
adjustment to the events of the globe. 

The whole misery of the situation discloses itself in 
the kind of news which the American papers print 
about the European continent. There is no lack of 
material, and the sensation of the day is cabled with 
such an abundance of detail that at least the reader of 
the large and leading papers has a general feeling 
that he is getting plenty of information from Rome 
and Constantinople, from Paris and St. Petersburg. It 
is only necessary, however, to sift all this news for 
some months, as a scholarly historian would sift his ma- 
terial, and the vague admiration for the cable expenses 
of the newspapers soon turns into a sincere pity for the 
misinformed reader. I took considerable pains during 
a whole year to study the international news on both 
sides of the ocean. For instance, with the help of 
able assistants, I examined carefully the number of 



8i AMERICAN PATRIOTISM 

lines devoted to American news in certain important 
European papers and to continental European news in 
leading American papers. From the mere counting 
of the quantities we went on to a detailed analysis, 
comparing so far as possible the so-called facts, which 
the American correspondents in Europe confided to the 
wires, with the actual events as they were known on 
those same dates to the careful peruser of European 
journals — and vice versa. There was no reason to 
be proud of the achievements of the European papers. 
Their so-called information too often emphasized the 
sensational. Yet their work appeared almost like a 
thorough study compared with the looseness and care- 
lessness with which European news was gathered for 
the customers on Broadway. The most trivial inci- 
dents were picked up and magnified into important 
events, and happenings of momentous consequence 
were ignored; the facts themselves were distorted be- 
cause essential features were carelessly omitted and 
their connections were presented with the irresponsibil- 
ity of gossip. Of course the American reader is be- 
yond the stage in which everything printed is taken as 
true, but whatever is cabled still comes to him with a 
certain right to be believed. After those months of 
serious inquiry, I am sure the pictures the American 
reader accepts as exact photographic reproductions are 
on the whole hasty sketches by careless and often un- 



AMERICAN PATRIOTISM 9 

skillful draftsmen, poorly suited to the American of 
to-day. True patriotism cannot demand that the great 
historical movements in foreign lands be pushed into 
shady corners of the press reports to keep unlimited 
room on the sunny side of the newspapers for the 
homemade murder trials and ward-politics. 

But the newspapers are after all only one element 
in the relations between civilized nations. We are 
so proud of the international character of our art and 
science, and all the cultural and social endeavors of 
mankind; we are too little aware that this international- 
ism can easily lead to chaos if it is not planfully di- 
rected and supervised. We no longer travel in mail- 
coaches and sailing-boats from land to land, and yet 
we too easily forget that the intellectual intercourse 
of the nations also demands ever new modernizations. 
If left to the casual and haphazard influences of mere 
commercial interests, even those cultural values may 
be of little avail for making the nations of the earth 
really acquainted with one another. 

I have tried systematically to study the selection of 
European books that have appeared in translation on 
the American market. The result gave me a pitiful 
showing, as much by the glaring omissions in the list 
as by the preposterous inclusions. This seems to be 
true of the literature of all countries as far as I was 
able to discover. Often a book finally lands in America 



io AMERICAN PATRIOTISM 

when it has become entirely antiquated at home and 
has lost all significance for the country in which it orig- 
inated. The German book which stirred some leading 
critics most deeply this year, and was accepted as the 
last symptom of German movements, produced the 
same heat of emotion a decade ago in the Fatherland 
and there has long been covered with dust. It is well 
known that the persistent efforts of a few great art 
dealers have created in the American market a 
monopoly for French paintings through artificially 
awakening a taste, then a fashion and finally a craving 
for an art which originally did not lie at all in the 
line of American instincts. In a similar way accidental 
factors have determined the most recent prevalence of 
Italian opera in the operatic life of the nation. It is 
to a high degree just as accidental that in the field of 
scholarship Germany was for a long while the only 
place of pilgrimage for American students. At the 
same time America herself does not make any effort 
to bring to the other nations her own spiritual products. 
From Paris to Moscow, the bookstores have almost 
given up the effort to import American books when 
their customers order them. They feel utterly help- 
less; they do not know how to reach the American 
publishers, who do not take the slightest trouble to ac- 
commodate themselves to European needs. 

These questions of arbitrariness and prejudices in 



AMERICAN PATRIOTISM n 

the cultural field are so earnestly before my mind be- 
cause I devoted much time during my exchange year 
to the organization of a new institute in Berlin, which 
was crystallized about such interests: the " Amerika- 
Institut." Its purpose was to further and to expand 
the cultural relation between the United States and 
Germany. This sounds almost trivial, and it appears 
as if just this labor were being performed in many 
places. But in the whole history of civilization prob- 
ably no such enterprise has ever been recorded, and 
what it aims at may truly be the model for future de- 
velopments. It works for the necessary modernization 
of international intercourse, a kind of efficiency man- 
agement in the world of ideals. The relations of civ- 
ilized countries have always been carefully organized 
in political, legal and economic affairs, but in the field 
of education and scholarship, art and literature, moral 
and social purposes, the international exchange is noth- 
ing but disorder. Energies are wasted, efforts are 
scattered, the cheapest elements often rush into the 
foreground, the best impulses remain inhibited; in 
short, disorganization prevails. The purpose of this 
new German institute is to improve the situation so 
far as Germany and America are concerned, helping 
and adjusting and harmonizing the scattered efforts 
which have arisen and may arise on both sides of the 
ocean. 



12 AMERICAN PATRIOTISM 

Our modern civilization demands such systematic 
help in the field of unpolitical and uncommercial en- 
deavors, but this effort of Germany must be only the 
beginning. If the value of the principle is once recog- 
nized, it must lead further. On the one side, Ger- 
many must develop similar institutes for the relations 
to all the other civilized nations; on the other side, all 
the great countries must create such institutes of cul- 
tural organization for their own exchange with the im- 
portant peoples of the globe. All the nations will 
then become interrelated in their cultural work as they 
are related politically by the diplomatic agencies; but 
none would gain more through such national establish- 
ments than the United States, in which, as I have in- 
sisted, the cultural relations to the leading fellow coun- 
tries are more accidental and disorganized than any 
great European country would tolerate. True patriot- 
ism cannot possibly demand that the nation care for 
nothing from foreign countries except what comes 
drifting on the waves of chance. 

It appears strange that there is no more intimate 
acquaintance when we consider how many thousands 
of American tourists land every summer in Cherbourg 
and Rotterdam, in Hamburg and Bremen, in Naples 
and Genoa. Yet is their method, and still more their 
attitude in traveling, really adapted to ideal purposes? 
To be sure, most of them look on it as a gaudy vaca- 



AMERICAN PATRIOTISM 13 

tion. They have an " awfully good time " or they 
are " terribly bored "; but in any case they do not feel 
obliged to make deep researches and sociological in- 
vestigations or to work hard as unofficial delegates of 
their country for the cultivation of international friend- 
ship. Of course no one demands that from them. 
And yet everyone who travels is practically a kind of 
unofficial delegate of his nation, and has a certain in- 
fluence on the general relations of the peoples. More- 
over, though he may be out only for irresponsible fun 
the traveler gathers information after all and picks up 
impressions; and they help to shape the views of his 
fellow-countrymen. Everything that he might gain 
and achieve is spoiled from the start if he comes with 
the wrong attitude. 

There are plenty of exceptions, but the great mass 
of American travelers nowadays go through Europe 
with a social haughtiness and an air of superiority 
which practically preclude a sympathetic understanding 
of the national life about them. No doubt they like 
quite well the quaint old towns and the mediaeval ar- 
chitecture, but the people who live there are considered 
more or less as stage supernumeraries whom the coun- 
tries must keep in order that visitors may get a roman- 
tic impression. The mountains in Switzerland are de- 
lightful, but the inhabitants, of course, are only waiters 
and curiosity dealers. Everyone enjoys the picture 



i 4 AMERICAN PATRIOTISM 

galleries of Italy, but the Italians are just good enough 
to kneel picturesquely in their old churches. 

More than four decades have passed since Lowell 
wrote, not without resentment, his famous essay " On 
a Certain Condescension in Foreigners." The tables 
have been entirely turned. The most touchy Ameri- 
can may be satisfied with the admiration that Europe 
has for the strong side of this great republic and with 
the unspoken flattery which it offers by its overzealous 
imitation. Those thousands of American tourists who 
flit through the older lands in their automobiles find 
nothing but deference among the foreigners with whom 
they come in contact. It is the average European who 
to-day gets the taste of a certain condescension in for- 
eigners who hang small silk flags with the Stars and 
Stripes out of their hotel windows. They come with 
their minds made up that Italians do not know how to 
cook and that their railways are intolerable for a de- 
cent American; that the French are perverse in their 
morality and that they never take a bath; and that the 
Germans have no other thoughts than lager beer and 
the policeman — in short they look on continental 
Europeans with about that wisdom with which the man 
on Broadway sometimes speaks of Bostonians when he 
grins and simply says: " Baked Beans! " 

Whatever improvements are made in those obsolete 
countries seem to them to have resulted not from 



AMERICAN PATRIOTISM 15 

general progress but from the natural desire to satisfy 
the well-tipping tourist. They have no idea in what a 
wonderful rhythm of internal development the leading 
countries of the European continent are moving on 
the common road of social ideals. They do not see 
how much in the labor movement, how much in the 
struggles for women and children, how much in the 
educational world, how much in the civil service and 
in a thousand other fields, would be suggestive and 
helpful — yes, truly inspiring — to the American who 
would come not to look down but to take part in a 
sympathetic mood. It is simply depressing to find 
out on the returning steamer what third-class opinions 
these first-class passengers have really brought home. 
True patriotism cannot possibly demand that the 
American visit foreign lands with his purse open, but 
with his eyes shut. 

Is not this condescension to foreigners even a part 
of the political creed of the American on the street? 
The old stump speaking on the rotten monarchies of 
Europe has probably died out; but when the average 
politician scrambles for some reasons why the Monroe 
Doctrine ought to be upheld, he will not forget the 
moral argument that the governmental system of the 
republics stands on a level much higher than that of 
those monarchies which are seeking a foothold in South 
America. Fortunately there is at present no state in 



1 6 AMERICAN PATRIOTISM 

Europe which has the remotest idea of violating the 
traditional Monroe Doctrine; but comparison of the 
sham principles of some of those operetta repub- 
lics with the ethical values of the historic monarch- 
ies is worse than bad politics — it is bad education. 

Can it be denied that even all the modern discussions 
on peace and disarmament, on arbitration treaties and 
the causes of righteous wars, get a good deal of their 
steam from the confident belief that it is the duty and 
mission of America to be the preceptor of Europe in 
the department of higher morality? Arbitration 
treaties seem welcome to the whole nation, and cer- 
tainly a number of the friends of peace believe in them 
without restriction; but so much has surely been shown 
by the discussion — the crowd considers them welcome 
only up to the point where, according to their feeling, 
fighting is necessary after all. Hardly any American 
doubts that no written arbitration treaty would hinder 
the American nation from fighting against any Euro- 
pean country if it believed that its just interests were at 
stake. 

In other words, the Americans take it for granted 
that, whatever agreements may be made, American 
public opinion must remain the supreme judge of the 
world's affairs. For this reason, in fact, not a few at- 
tack such treaties as necessarily insincere and proclaim 
that just wars ought not to be suppressed, and that a 



AMERICAN PATRIOTISM 17 

righteous war in a good cause may be better than a 
peaceful endurance of injustice; but is there not lurk- 
ing behind this argument too the feeling of national 
superiority? In modern times the dire burden of 
war does not fall upon nations because there is justice 
on the one side and injustice on the other. The ulti- 
mate pretext for the war may be some quarrel which 
might be looked on as if right must be with the one 
party and wrong with the other; but what boots the 
pretext? The powder barrel that explodes is war, 
and not the match that sets it off. 

War finds its natural condition when the wholesome 
growth of two rivals has reached a point at which 
there is no longer any room for the expansion of both. 
If two men love the same girl, there is no chance for 
a compromise and for arbitration, nor is there justice 
with the one and injustice with the other. Japan was 
in the right and Russia was in the right too — or 
rather the question of right and wrong was not in- 
volved when the two giants were wrestling for suprem- 
acy in the East. If England's and Russia's national 
interests conflicted in Asia, no concert of nations would 
have a moral right to say that either side is wrong. 
Any judgment of this kind would be an answer to a 
meaningless question. What a lack of historical per- 
spective in those bitter denunciations with which the 
editorials of the American papers accompanied the 



eS AMERICAN PATRIOTISM 

various phases of the Balkan War. The American 
public played the grand jury before which Austria had 
to defend itself, when it was about to " rob " Servia of 
the fruits of victory. True patriotism cannot demand 
from Americans that they flourish the big stick across 
the Atlantic. 

Is not this careless, haughty, condescending, unfair 
behavior toward the European nations ultimately the 
residue of a patriotic view that really already belongs to 
the past? While all this unfriendliness survives, can 
it be overlooked that recent times have slowly changed 
American ideas as to their own national life? The 
American nation has grown up with the idea that it is 
an English nation and that, just as its language is Eng- 
lish, its life character and its heart's blood are Anglo- 
:;::Dn too. The Anglo-Saxon is the true American, 
England is the country of kinship; the immigrants who 
come from other countries are useful fellow workers 
and desirable guests, but they remain guests and the 
countries from which they are derived remain foreign 
countries. They may be the home countries of the 
guests, but no ties of kinship connect the countries with 
the American nation. Has the American nation, how- 
ever, really any need for persistently ignoring the fact 
that this whole theory is an artificial construction based 
on an untenable illusion? 

Malicious critics of Europe like to present the na- 



AMERICAN PATRIOTISM 19 

tional life over there as if all were held together by 
willful theories of the aristocratic classes forced on the 
suggestible masses and finally accepted by them with 
enthusiastic ignorance; what must be said then of the 
dogma preached by an aristocratic minority of the 
country here, through which the non-Anglo-Saxon ma- 
jority is delegated to the position of guests and hyphen- 
ated citizens ? The Irish and the Scotch, the Germans 
and the Dutch, the Danish and the Swedish, the Aus- 
trians and the Italians, the French and the Russians, 
have heard the story believingly for a long while; but 
finally their patience has come to an end and their non- 
English consciousness has awakened. They have 
studied the history of their ancestors in this country and 
have become proud of their contributions to the devel- 
opment of this great nation. They have discovered 
how the traditions of the schoolbooks and the teachings 
of public opinion unfairly and grotesquely ignore that 
wonderful cooperation and they suddenly feel like 
children who discover that the story of the stork will 
not do, after all. 

Those seventeen million German-Americans, for in- 
stance, know that the blood of their ancestors was of- 
fered for the unity of this nation; that the brawn and 
the brain of their fathers helped to build its prosperity; 
that their education and their character have given 
tremendous momentum to the glorious work of the peo- 



20 AMERICAN PATRIOTISM 

pie, and that they themselves are just as good Ameri- 
can citizens as the Anglo-Americans. Those Germans 
who sought their homes in Pennsylvania in the seven- 
teenth century are to the millions of modern German- 
Americans what the Pilgrim Fathers are to those de- 
scended from English stock. The time has passed 
when the children felt ashamed that their parents were 
not of English but of Teutonic origin. They know 
that the statue of Steuben in Washington is not only 
the monument to the great teacher of Washington's 
army but a symbol in the national capitol of the inces- 
sant service which German teachers and soldiers, build- 
ers and farmers, have rendered to all parts of the land. 
They feel with indignation that the American history 
taught in the little schoolhouse is a fabrication in which 
not only all gratitude but even the most modest ac- 
knowledgment for the abundant aid of the German 
pioneers to American civilization b left out Exactly 
the same change has come to all the other peoples. 
The one man who is the idol of the nation has never 
lost a chance to tell how Dutch and Scotch and Irish 
and French blood is mixed in his veins. 

This new feeling and attitude of the majority neces- 
sarily demand a fundamental revision of the antiquated 
national theory. The American people is not an Eng- 
lish, nor a Dutch, nor a French, nor a German, nor an 
Irish people. The American nation is an entirely new 



AMERICAN PATRIOTISM 21 

people which, like all the other great nations of the 
world, has arisen from a mixture of races and from a 
blending of nationalities. The ties of kinship do not 
connect it with England more than with Ireland or 
Holland or Germany or Sweden. All these races are 
united and assimilated here — not by a common racial 
origin, but by a common national task. They must 
work out in unity the destiny of a nation to which all 
the leading countries of Europe have contributed their 
most enterprising elements as bearers of their particu- 
lar traits and ideals. A new patriotism has sprung up 
that does not aim toward the conservation of an Eng- 
lish people, but hopes for the highest development of 
a unique nation in which the finest qualities of all Eu- 
rope will be blended. 

This new patriotism alone can be a true stimulus to 
all the healthy elements in this great country. The old 
kind of patriotism has been really holding back the non- 
English elements, as it forced on them the artificial task 
of imitating something which was not in harmony with 
their inmost nature. The new patriotism inspires 
everyone to his duty of contributing the very best of the 
ideals of his home country to the happiness of the 
whole. The new patriotism of to-morrow will not 
know hosts or guests among the citizens of this coun- 
try. The nation is one solid whole; and whatever 
European country has contributed to its inheritance 



22 AMERICAN PATRIOTISM 

must have its share in the gratitude of every inhabitant. 
The Irish- or Dutch- or Swedish- or German- or 
French-American would be utterly ungrateful if he 
were to forget how endlessly much England has given 
to this nation which is now his own. And the Anglo- 
American would be no less ungrateful if he were to 
forget what the European continent has poured out for 
the strength and the beauty and the blessing of his 
beloved land. Since the people with all the manifold- 
ness of elements feel themselves one, the nation can- 
not have a diversity of ancestors — all Europe is the 
mother country. To see this mother country's achieve- 
ments will be ever} 7 American's pride, to visit its soil 
will be his inspiration — the intercourse will never be 
without respect and even the rivalry never without sym- 
pathy. The Anglo-American resentment of yesterday 
and the condescension of to-day toward continental Eu- 
rope will yield to friendship. True patriotism cannot 
demand that the American people draw apart and fall 
asunder when their hearts turn lovingly to their ances- 
tral homes. There ought not to be civil war on the 
battlefields of European memories. 



THE EDUCATIONAL UNREST 



This essay first appeared in the Metropolitan Magazine 



THE EDUCATIONAL UNREST 

UNREST is life. There could be nothing worse 
for our schools and colleges and universities than 
a general feeling of satisfaction with that which has 
been accomplished. Educational stagnation would 
certainly be the beginning of educational decay. We 
need the experimenting even if some reforms do not 
reform, we need the discussions, we need the grum- 
bling, and indeed, we may be satisfied even with the 
dissatisfaction. But what is desirable in the conflict 
of opinion is a certain clearness as to the issues. If 
too much is merely left to vague instincts, there is too 
little chance for systematic progress; the efforts are 
made in a haphazard way. There must be fighting, 
but the fighters ought to see with open eyes against 
whom they are lined up. The discussions do not be- 
come efficient as long as there is no practical platform. 
We must recognize the chief principles in order to un- 
derstand the apparently chaotic tendencies and cross- 
purposes in the educational impulses of the time. 
Where ought we to start in order to discover the essen- 

25 



26 THE EDUCATIONAL UNREST 

tial needs of our time? Ought we to begin at the 
bottom or at the top, at the elementary schools or at 
the universities? 

Many millions go to the ordinary schools, while only 
a handful can afford to go to the highest seats of learn- 
ing. Accordingly, it seems as if our interest ought to 
be centered on the needs of these millions, and as if it 
would be snobbish if the chief attention were given to 
those who can attain the highest advantages of educa- 
tional development. If we have good schools, the 
health and progress of the nation seems secure, and it 
appears therefore secondary to ask for the best condi- 
tions under which the universities may flourish. Yet 
this may be a treacherous delusion. Of course, if we 
have good schools much may be gained. But the ques- 
tion is what we mean by good schools; perhaps just this 
problem cannot be solved rightly unless it is constantly 
controlled by the life concerns of the highest institu- 
tions. The history of civilization shows indeed that 
the educational ideals of a country are always shaped 
by the demands and ideals and inspirations of the most 
advanced and highest institutions. It is superficial to 
think that mere common sense can determine the stand- 
ards for the education of the masses, since this so-called 
common sense is nothing but the outcome of the hard- 
est and highest thought among the deepest thinkers of 
the nation. The stream of ideas never flows upward; 



THE EDUCATIONAL UNREST 27 

its source always springs from the height of the noblest 
minds. 

Even in the most external way we see how the edu- 
cational principles work downward. The students of 
the universities become the teachers and supervisors 
of the schools and carry the impulses which they re- 
ceived in academic halls to the schoolrooms of the 
country. Moreover, the entrance conditions of the 
higher institutions set the goals for the lower ones, and 
the raising of their level has been the chief cause of the 
improvement of tKe high schools. But the internal in- 
fluences are much more important. Any poor fad at 
the universities soon distorts the elementary class work. 
Any new deep insight in the colleges brings blessings 
to hundreds of thousands of schoolrooms. The real 
ambitions and hopes of education are controlled and 
can be measured by the spirit of its most prominent 
and highest institutions. All this is finally true of 
every sphere of national activity. The business life 
of the country ultimately gains its character from the 
largest economic forces. The few great corporations 
and not the millions of small stores are shaping the 
commercial ideas of the land, and even in the field of 
moral virtues it is a mistake to believe that it can be 
otherwise. We have heard an exceptional man ham- 
mering into the masses the tempting doctrine that the 
exceptional man does not count and that the virtues of 



28 THE EDUCATIONAL UNREST 

the millions alone are deciding the fate of the nation. 
Yet Roosevelt's sermon is less than half of the story, 
as it is not true that these masses ever develop virtuous 
lives without the inspiration of great leaders, who have 
new visions of human duties and human ideals and new 
strength for imparting them. If we want to decide 
what kind of studies and what kind of methods, what 
kind of teachers and what kind of pupils, are to be pre- 
ferred, let us by all means see clearly what is needed 
for the best work at the top. If the right spirit pre- 
vails there, it will work down and bring the greatest 
efficiency and wholesomeness to the work of the village 
schools. 

We must therefore consider first the battles which 
are raging on the university grounds. We may begin 
with the most natural question — what kind of studies 
are to be pursued? Here we do not care for the de- 
tails; we only want to see the great party divisions. 
Of course they are nowhere acknowledged as such, but 
the observer ought to recognize the antagonism of the 
underlying forces, even if externally some compromise 
has been effected. To be sure, there cannot be much 
difference of opinion regarding professional schools for 
the expert The lawyer has to study law, the physician 
medicine, the minister divinity, the engineer technology. 
There the choice of studies is essentially a practical one 
and while it is true that in those special fields also op- 



THE EDUCATIONAL UNREST 29 

posing ideas as to the order of studies and the methods 
can be traced and are important, yet great educational 
principles are less involved. It is quite different in the 
sphere of the college. Commencement speeches and 
inauguration addresses have often drawn the attention 
of wider circles to the collegiate unrest. If we are to 
group the often chaotic tendencies and the often acci- 
dental changes under two great principles, we may say 
that it is a fight between cultural education and profes- 
sional education in college. 

Now at first we do not want to take sides; we want 
to understand the issues in a neutral spirit and so we 
may approach the antithesis here and further on with 
the best will to see the good features on both sides. 
The aim of those who believe in the cultural purpose 
of college studies is to keep professionalism as far as 
possible from the academic halls. The college gradu- 
ates, men or women, may enter into any sphere of pro- 
fessional activity, may seek their way to the law school 
or medical school, may go to the banking house or to 
the factory, may go into domestic activity or into public 
life, but they ought to devote their years of collegiate 
life to a work which secures the harmonious growth of 
their minds. Those who can devote the years of 
adolescence to their intellectual development and who 
are not obliged to go from the school straight to the 
market-places of the world ought to spend this happy 



3 o THE EDUCATIONAL UNREST 

time in the service of true culture in order to prepare 
themselves for highest efficiency. They ought to se- 
cure a common possession of ideals before they are 
separated by the needs of the various practical activi- 
ties. 

Two demands aire paramount for the interest of the 
nation. The mind ought to be trained to highest effi- 
ciency and the individual ought to come into the broad- 
est possible contact with the world. If the mind is 
really trained to efficiency, it will master any task 
which the practical life may set later on. The mind 
must be schooled to exert serious effort, must become 
able to hold the important and to dismiss the trivial, 
and to approach any problem in the right spirit. On 
the other hand, he who goes out into the world must 
have reached the point where nothing human is foreign 
to his interest and where everything is seen in its cor- 
rect perspective. 

This aim leads to two important principles in the 
selection of studies. In order to secure the right ap- 
proach and thus to prepare the mind to take the most 
efficient attitude toward whatever life may bring, the 
college must insist on a certain concentration of studies. 
Each student must learn to do one thing well. He 
must not be allowed to scatter his work in an irrespon- 
sible way but must be held to one consistent plan in 
which a large part of his work is grouped around one 



THE EDUCATIONAL UNREST 31 

center. But in order to bring to everyone the fullest 
acquaintance with the manifoldness of that which will 
surround him, the college must insist on a certain ex- 
pansion of studies. The work # in the college years 
must not be too one-sided; it must be distributed over 
all important fields. It will not do for a young man 
or a young woman to go through college and bring 
home nothing but a smattering of knowledge from a 
score of fields, studying merely the beginnings of a 
large number of unrelated sciences without going to real 
depths in any. But it is no less intolerable for those 
four years to be devoted exclusively to chemistry or to 
Sanscrit while the world around is forgotten. It may 
be difficult to find the right balance between this de- 
mand for concentration and the demand for expansion. 
And to a certain degree it may be arbitrary to decide 
how much shall belong to that central field and how 
much to the periphery, but certainly everyone ought to 
become seriously interested in one subject and yet gain 
an acquaintance with natural sciences and historical 
sciences, with mathematics and philosophy, with lan- 
guages and literature, with economics and government. 
Such collegiate years would furnish a true education in 
which every motive of commercialism and professional- 
ism is kept entirely in the background. 

The other side opposes such cultural ideals with seri- 
ous arguments and with unserious ridicule. They say 



32 THE EDUCATIONAL UNREST 

the nation cannot afford to waste the best years of the 
young men and women in useless, unpractical engage- 
ments. All that kind of cultural education ought to be 
brushed away and may be left to the private finishing 
schools for fashionable young ladies. The college 
is not a country club where young men are to amuse 
themselves without any thought of their future practi- 
cal responsibilities; the college is not for the idle sons 
of rich parents who spend their years in preparing 
themselves for nothing in particular. The struggle 
for existence is sharp and every hour ought to be de- 
voted to preparation for the life task. Moreover, if 
the mind is to grow, it can grow only in freedom. All 
coercion ought to be foreign to academic life. Let 
everyone develop in the direction of his strongest im- 
pulse and instead of demanding that he scatter his 
studies over large, expanded fields give him the fullest 
chance to choose what harmonizes best with his natural 
gifts which he ought to strengthen for his later practi- 
cal work. 

Thus the professionalist who makes his case against 
the culturist also has two fundamental demands. 
Against the wish for concentration and expansion he 
puts the claim for useful election and for unrestricted 
liberty. If a young man is to enter the medical school, 
let him not lose any day of his college years in other 
than naturalistic studies; let him spend his time in the 



THE EDUCATIONAL UNREST 33 

biological and chemical laboratories, but do not let him 
throw away his time on history of Greek art and Ital- 
ian literature, on logic or political economy. But above 
all give him the fullest opportunity to follow his per- 
sonal inclination. His instincts will tell him best what 
he needs. Liberty is the atmosphere for intellectual 
progress. Only if he is unhampered by the traditional 
demands for distributed studies can he reach out for 
the greatest mastery in his chosen field. 

This struggle has found characteristic expression in 
the academic movements of the last few years. Even 
in the same institutions some changes may point in the 
one, some in the other direction, because the partisans? 
of the one or the other side are often together in the 
same faculty room. Unless all signs are misleading 
it may be said that just now the professionalists are 
on the retreat and the culturists advancing. It is char- 
acteristic that the oldest and most influential university 
of the land, which has led in the struggle for free elec- 
tion of courses, under its new administration has turned 
toward a firm demand for systematic regulation of 
studies, insisting both on concentration and on expan- 
sion. Concentration must not be misinterpreted to 
mean a preparatory focusing on the future life work. 
On the contrary, the new leader of Harvard University 
emphasized only recently that the future lawyer ought 
to study history or economics, not because law demands 



34 THE EDUCATIONAL UNREST 

history, but just because law with its strictly logical 
aims stands so far away from history. No one can 
overlook the great value which the freedom of election 
had for the development of the higher studies, but no 
one can ignore the further fact that it was indeed high 
time to check this unrestricted freedom. That which 
was intended as liberty approached anarchy. Instead 
of the expected development of the personal powers, 
we saw simply a flabby preference for the paths of least 
resistance; instead of years of training the college time 
became for too many a period in which the power of 
energetic mental work became enervated by lack of 
use and a habit of superficiality developed. 

Concentrated studies alone demand systematic effort, 
and without insistence on such concentration, too large 
a number will miss this greatest opportunity for real 
training. On the other hand, it was just the conscien- 
tious and industrious man who was naturally and almost 
necessarily inclined to concentrate too much and to con- 
centrate on those subjects which he believed to be useful 
for his practical life purposes. The result was that sad 
product of our modern universities, the uneducated ex- 
pert. It is a happy turn when public opinion begins to 
demand again that the broadest possible culture be the 
basis of the life work for those who are to lead the 
masses. Yes, it was not difficult to discover that the 
building up of professionalism and expert work on the 



THE EDUCATIONAL UNREST 35 

ground of expanded knowledge is ultimately also the 
most practical scheme. The young man who enters 
even the business office with a broad college education of 
rich cultural character may in the first year stand be- 
hind the boy who got his office training immediately 
after the high school, but a few years later he will have 
surpassed him, and experience shows that the modern 
conditions of life tend more from year to year to make 
this success probable. The expert work belongs to the 
graduate departments of the university. The highest 
completion of his intellectual work the teacher finds in 
the graduate schools, the professional man in the pro- 
fessional schools, the business man in the commercial 
schools and schools for business administration, the 
technical man in the graduate departments for applied 
science. But after all, the college can give to everyone 
its very best by a training in concentrated effort and 
attention and by widening the mental horizon. 

The same antithesis goes through the whole school life 
and as soon as we have weighed the advantages and dis- 
advantages of the opposing views on the college level, 
we can recognize more clearly the values of the corre- 
sponding tendencies in the high schools and even in the 
primary schools. On the surface here too, it may appear 
as if all the right is on the side of those who demand 
that the youth of the nation be prepared for practical 
life work as early as possible. The funds of the 



36 THE EDUCATIONAL UNREST 

community should not be wasted on luxuries; the useful 
studies ought to prevail. And again there g:>es hand 
in hand with ibis demand the further wish that the 
pupil select with full freedom those studies which har- 
monize with his inclinations. Why reach the boy who 
is to become a farmer anything about antiquity instead 
of about cattle and wheat? Why burden the future 
business man with literature instead of bookkeeping? 
Often indeed it appears as if for those who argue on 
this side culture is to be subdivided into agriculture, 
horticulture and similar divisions. 

But the shortsightedness of all such views quickly 
shows itself. The community has found out that such 
schemes may be well fitted to give the children a good 
time in school but lead them to a bad time afterward. 
Life is hard work and if they have never learned in 
school to give their concentrated attention to that which 
does not appeal to them and which does not interest 
them immediately, they have missed the most valua'rie 
lesson of their school years. The little practical in- 
formation they could have learned at any time: the 
energy of attention and concentration can no longer be 
learned if the early years are wasted. However nar- 
row and commercial the standpoint which is chosen 
may be, it can always be found that it is the general 
education which pays best, and the more the period of 
cultural work can be expanded the more efficient will 



THE EDUCATIONAL UNREST 37 

be the services of the school for the practical purposes 
of the nation. The schools which cater to the demand 
for direct practical usefulness become trivial, and those 
which are subservient to the demand for unrestricted 
freedom become overwhelmed with fads and fancies. 
The youths who leave such schoolrooms are unpre- 
pared for the real duties of life. Their attention is 
turning to everything which appeals to the lower in- 
stincts. The big headlines within and without the 
newspapers hold their mind. There is no hope of 
serious resistance to the temptations of life. Truly the 
best interests of the nation can be secured only if the 
school most earnestly follows the lead of the new tend- 
encies in university life. School work also fulfills its 
highest purpose only if it aims toward a training of 
the mind in concentrated effort and toward a widening 
of the mind by a sympathetic interest in all the ideal 
purposes of humanity. The authority of the school 
with its serious discipline must remove that spirit of 
go-as-you-please and the belief in the ideal values of 
culture must fill even the humblest classroom, if the 
child is to be well prepared for the turmoil of the mar- 
ket. 

It is curious to see in recent days how much this dis- 
cussion of culture and professionalism has gone over 
into an entirely different discussion. The question 
what kind of studies are desirable in the colleges has 



38 THE EDUCATIONAL UNREST 

been turned into the question: what kind of students 
do we want to see there? For whom are the college 
halls built? For the few or for the masses? But this 
antithesis may take many forms. It may easily be ex- 
pressed in such a form that no reasonable observer can 
doubt that a preference for the few means destruction 
of the college spirit. The college is not a place for a 
social aristocracy, is not a club for rich boys and fa- 
mous athletes, who look down upon the modest 
" grinds " and the poor men's sons. It is with full jus- 
tice that some university presidents have recently turned 
with vigor against the overwhelming influence of the 
social clubs and against their snobbish isolation. Life at 
large throws together many kinds of men. It is not 
desirable for the college to create artificial conditions 
in favor of stronger lines of demarcation instead of 
doing its best to see that just at the period of college 
life most different types come into intimate contact 
on an equal level. The college ought to stand against 
prejudice and narrowness. 

But all this is very different from the antithesis of 
the few and the many, if by the few are meant the men 
with exceptional gifts and superior powers. Certainly 
in recent years the feeling has grown that our uni- 
versity system is too much adapted to the average man 
who does not want to be anything but average, and that 
this satisfaction with the commonplace is unfair to the 



THE EDUCATIONAL UNREST 39 

interests of those who promise the most for the national 
future. There is no doubt that much in the to and fro 
movements of our university life to-day is caused by 
this fear and by the opposition to it. A characteristic 
symptom is the struggle about the method of instruc- 
tion. There are teachers who would like to perform 
all the university work in very small classes, if possible 
always with a few men, under strictest control of the 
instructor, thus bringing every individual under the 
sharpest supervision and making sure that everybody 
is doing exactly the prescribed work. And there are 
others who put the emphasis on the large lecture 
courses in which suggestions and inspirations are dis- 
seminated from the best teachers and where the strong- 
est minds will get endlessly more than from the school- 
like treatment of the tutors, but where the weak men 
may gain discouragingly little. Is it wise to put such 
weight on the examinations and quizzes and recitations 
and tests and prescribed reading by which the dullest 
is forced to learn something, but by which the best are 
held down to the level of mediocrity? Or is it wiser 
to stir up the self-activity, to develop that delight in 
learning and thinking which may lead the superior men 
to lasting achievements? It is easy to ridicule the in- 
effectiveness of the mere lectures for the lower men 
of the classes, but easier still to show up the cheapness 
of the recitation and quiz system for the better men. 



40 THE EDUCATIONAL UNREST 

This must not be confused, as it sometimes is in the 
discussions, with the antithesis of aristocratic and demo- 
cratic views. The educational aristocrats would say 
that anyhow the best men alone count, just as the 
achievements of a nation in the history of civilization 
are counted by the performances of the geniuses. 
They would say that a little land like Norway is great 
because it has had an Ibsen and a Grieg and a Bjorn- 
son, and so on, and a large land like Canada has still 
to wait for greatness because no genius has yet ap- 
peared there. But the educational democrat who sees 
the goal in the highest development of the masses would 
misunderstand the sociological laws if he were to care 
less for the greatest possible chances of the superior 
men. The masses, too, are always raised only by their 
leaders. Universities which work for the greatest pos- 
sible opportunities for the best men are more efficiently 
working toward the raising of the average level than 
those which hamper the strong and pamper the weak- 
ling. Truly it is discouraging to see how those thou- 
sands of students spend years in an atmosphere of learn- 
ing and yet open a book in the library only with the 
question as to which chapters are prescribed for their 
reading and feel an instinctive horror of the unpre- 
scribed pages. Then we wonder that the result of 
our methods is an intellectual apathy and that the 
graduates in their clubs, when they return in later life, 



THE EDUCATIONAL UNREST 41 

fall into raptures of enthusiasm over the football 
heroes and have nothing but ridicule for those who ex- 
cel in scholarship in their college days. They feel as if 
they were doing a great deed if perhaps at the distri- 
bution of awards for the best scholars they pump up a 
speech which not entirely but almost excuses the ex- 
istence of a scholar. 

Here again we may say that the same principles less 
clearly defined are in opposition in the school career. 
Much of the zigzag course of our school reforms re- 
sults from the wavering between a desire to awake the 
superior pupils to fullest spontaneity and the counter- 
desire to adjust everything to the average and 
sub-average. There can be hardly any doubt that the 
nation wastes an immense wealth of natural gifts by de- 
stroying in tender years the instinctive desire for learn- 
ing and the joy in intellectual pursuits. The original 
curiosity of the pupils who want to find out more than 
that which is handed out to them is the clearest pre- 
diction of later high attainments in the world of cul- 
ture. But it can be quickly subdued if it finds no 
encouragement. And all this underlying wealth of the 
young minds will be wasted the more quickly the more 
the whole atmosphere of the social world is filled with 
an admiration for commercial success and material big- 
ness. Our schools and colleges alike complain that 
they are limited in their cultural efficiency by the super- 



42 THE EDUCATIONAL UNREST 

ficiality and materialism of the social surroundings. 
They are too little aware that they, and perhaps they 
alone, have the means to remold the community and 
to give higher standards for the future. 

The question, what kind of students ought to receive 
the foremost consideration is connected most intimately 
with the fundamental question as to what kind of teach- 
ers we need. Here again the university shows the 
issues most clearly. The friends of the college seem 
fundamentally divided in their opinions. One party puts 
all the emphasis on the effectiveness and ability of the 
teacher as such. His pedagogic skill, his indefatigable 
perseverance in explaining and drilling, his ability to 
make the material interesting, seem the most important 
qualifications. The other party believes in the produc- 
tive scholar. His ability to add to human knowledge 
by his own research and by his own mastery of scientific 
method qualifies him more than anything else for the 
role as leader of the best students. The mere repro- 
ductive teacher who hands over what others have found 
and thought can never stimulate the noblest attitude to- 
ward the world of thought, that of interest and spon- 
taneity. Here, too, it is easy to exaggerate the possible 
defects. It is, indeed, possible that a man who makes 
decisive contributions to the world of knowledge may 
be a first-class scholar and yet may be entirely unable 
to impart this knowledge to any group of students. It 



THE EDUCATIONAL UNREST 4 3 

is the duty of the nation to create for such men research 
positions in which their genius may follow its desires. 
But they are the exceptions. On the whole, the man 
who is the master of productive method is probably a 
fair teacher too. In the large universities accordingly, 
the victorious tendency at last seems to be the prefer- 
ence for the productive mind. A tradition is slowly 
being formed which essentially indicates that the best 
places belong to those who have contributed most to the 
advancement of knowledge. Indeed, there should be 
no doubt that it lies in the deepest interest of the true 
university that when the good teacher and the good 
scholar stand in competition, the good scholar ought 
to be selected every time. The influence of his spirit 
will be felt and will be far deeper with those men who 
are to be the leaders of the next generation in every 
field of life. 

Yet the country recognizes with increasing clear- 
ness that this most desirable type of teachers for the 
academic youth cannot be found in sufficient number 
and that an incessant effort is needed if the nation is to 
create that type of productive teachers. There seems 
to be a widespread disappointment. Hundreds of 
young men take the doctor degrees, prepare for the 
highest class of productive scholarship and after a few 
years their ambition seems to have evaporated and 
their entire work has become nothing but routine teach- 



44 THE EDUCATIONAL UNREST 

ing. This is perhaps the most important educational 
problem before the country, while on the surface it ap- 
pears as if it were a secondary question, almost a ques- 
tion concerning a byproduct. No; the right kind 
of university teacher makes the university, he and he 
alone, and the right university creates the right stand- 
ards of intellectual life throughout the nation, and 
the right national standards produce the right type of 
schools for the masses. 

It cannot be denied that many factors of our national 
life work strongly against this stimulation to creative 
scholarship. One thing stands in the foreground. 
The career of the scholar has not that social attractive- 
ness, not that instinctive recognition in the community 
which would draw the strongest talents into its service; 
and no technique can make a first-class scholar from 
second-rate material. Here is not the place to discuss 
the conditions which may increase the value of the 
scholarly productiveness. But we ought to admit 
without hesitation : this most ideal value will not be se- 
cured in our social fabric without material support. 
In a country in which success is too often measured by 
money and popular fame, the career must make con- 
cessions to these national conditions. Popular fame for 
the scholar cannot be made to order. As long as the 
country has no instinctive respect for the great scholar 
and does not care for his solid achievements, it cannot 



THE EDUCATIONAL UNREST 45 

be promised to the young man who wants to decide 
whether his energy and talent should be turned to schol- 
arship or to law or banking. This strongest incen- 
tive will not come until the nation has reached a much 
higher level of productive scholarship. To rely en- 
tirely on the internal motives, the joy of production and 
the life of intellectual progress, is to underrate the 
strength of the counter temptations. The only direct 
appeal must therefore be phrased in the language which 
is spoken all around; it must take the character of 
financial promise. 

First of all, the career of the university teacher 
ought to be one of financial security. Hence we can- 
not value too highly those steps which have been taken 
in recent years toward a pension system for university 
teachers. Above all, the Carnegie Foundation has 
added much to the security of the scholarly life. Yet 
even that is a help only if it is taken in the right spirit. 
The promise of a pension ought to give to the teacher 
the feeling that if disease makes him unable to live up 
to his ideal profession he will be protected against need, 
and such a pension ought to' come to him even 
if the years of service were few. But it is well 
known that the Carnegie Foundation started with the 
promise that any professor after twenty-five years of 
service would have the right to a pension without 
reference to his physical or mental disability. The 



46 THE EDUCATIONAL UNREST 

originators of this plan had the vague hope that this 
might give to some scholars the opportunity to de- 
vote themselves entirely to research work in which 
they had been hampered by their teaching engage- 
ments. These hopes had little basis. The man who 
in twenty-five years of teaching does not find the 
energy for research will not begin when his teaching 
stops. It would be an amateurish tampering with 
science. But too many men in the land interpreted 
the offer in a quite different spirit. They saw in it a 
welcome chance to get rid of the burden of teaching. 
Instead of adding dignity to the work, the offer threat- 
ened to lower the appreciation of the teacher's profes- 
sion. Men seemed willing to throw it off as soon as 
possible in order to turn to more profitable engage- 
ments. It is a step forward that the Carnegie 
Foundation has withdrawn this offer and has made the 
pension dependent upon infirmity or old age. 

But even now the pensioning system can be helpful 
only if it is not undermined by a wrong economy of 
the universities. There is a lurking danger that the 
universities will offer to the young men smaller salaries 
on account of the promised pension. The decisive help 
must therefore after all come from the institutions 
themselves which determine the salaries of the instruct- 
ors. But this seems to set narrow limits to any pos- 
sible raising of the standard. The universities may 



THE EDUCATIONAL UNREST 47 

sec quite clearly that the most energetic and most pro- 
ductive type of men would be more easily drawn into 
the university life if they could offer prizes similar to 
those which the great lawyers or captains of industry 
may gain. It is a sociological fact that the drawing 
power of a career depends upon the very highest re- 
wards and not upon the average. The universities 
may know that, but they know still better that their 
budget generally ends with a deficit and that the trus- 
tees have to go begging. How can they quadruple 
the salaries of their professors, when they have the 
greatest difficulty to make both ends meet with the 
meager salaries of to-day? 

But may there not be a grave mistake responsible for 
such a discouraging outlook? Would not these means 
even to-day be ample if only a deep-rooted prejudice 
were eradicated? The universities all over the coun- 
try believe that they gain strength by increasing the 
number of the staff instead of putting all the emphasis 
on the quality. All our higher institutions of learning 
are overmanned and however much they try to enlarge 
the staff and to create new and ever new positions, the 
day will come when they will recognize that less would 
be more and that they would be greater with fewer 
men. A university is not a department store ; it needs 
the chiefs of divisions but not an army of salesmen 
and floorwalkers. If the great universities were 



48 THE EDUCATIONAL UNREST 

slowly to reduce their faculty to a third and add the 
salaries of the other two-thirds to the income' of the 
men who remain, or rather, if for the remaining third 
of the places men were found who deserved that three- 
fold salary, a great service to national education would 
be done. Of course, such a strongly reduced staff 
could not possibly do all the intellectual police service 
which is to-day expected from the crowd of teachers. 
The professors would be intellectual leaders who show 
the way but would leave it to the interest of the students 
whether they would be ready to follow. The situation 
would become more like that of the German universi- 
ties in which ten men often cover the ground for which 
fifty seem indispensable here and yet secure more real 
stimulation to highest work. There is not the slight- 
est need for practically every course to be offered every 
year and for everything worth studying to be presented 
in lecture form. The printing-press was invented quite 
a while ago; the university lecture is not destined to 
present the whole subject but to give stimulus for spon- 
taneous study. Of course, then, the catalogues of the 
rival universities would not be heavy volumes. 

It is evident that this problem cannot be translated 
directly into the language of school questions. The 
schoolteacher ought not to be a productive scholar, 
and yet the essential decision ought to be the same — 
namely, that the personal quality of the teacher, his 



THE EDUCATIONAL UNREST 49 

highminded attitude toward the world of thought, is 
more important than anything in the school work and 
that no effort ought to be spared by the community to 
secure the best possible human material. The schools 
cannot fulfill their mission if the teaching positions are 
simply filled by the lowest bidders. The crowding out 
of men from the teacher's calling and the rushing in of 
women who teach simply because they want to escape 
the drudgery of domestic work is unworthy of a nation 
whose material resources are unparalleled. The social 
standing of the schoolteacher must be raised in the 
community, his income increased, his pension secured, 
his working time not overcrowded, his scholarly inter- 
est kept alive. A cheap schoolteacher ultimately 
means a cheap nation. 

We have spoken of the choice of studies, of the kind 
of pupils and of the kind of teachers. We have not 
spoken yet of the kind of scholarly methods which 
ought to prevail. There is no doubt that here, too, 
antagonistic movements can be felt. We may under- 
stand the varieties of attitudes most quickly if we give 
to them a national background. The prevailing 
method of university work to-day is distinctly the Ger- 
man method. While the old college was thoroughly 
English, the dome of the university which overspans it 
to-day is built from German stone. Through half a 
century the best young scholars went over the ocean to 



: : THE EDUCATIONAL UNREST 

bring home from the German universities that spirit 
of painstaking research which has secured a unique 

z'.i:t ::: 3errr.2.r. sihrlErshir. The Genr.m drctrr's 
degree was introduced where before only the bach- 
elor's and master's degrees were known and the organ- 
ization of the highest institutions was consciously 
planned under Gerrr.ir. lzinr.it. N:~ 2 n;ird::ld 
:rr:s:rl:n :iz. "re :e.:. Tzt:t is 2. -esterr. r:::r es- 
pecially at home in the state universities, which claims 
that German science is too abstract and theoretical, too 
far from practical interests and that in a democracy 
lie zzly sziz'.izs'zlz —\'ji 2. : z:.z :: ezis: is zzi: — iiiih 
serves the practical needs of the masses. Yet tins op- 
position cannot hope for success. A glance at the 
history of civilization shows that true progress toward 
practical goals has always been reached by science only 
when the scientific work was done for its own sake 
without any reference to the practical application. AD 
the great revolutionizing applications of knowledge 
have been only the ripe fruits from the tree of theory. 
But there are others who do not claim that German 
science is useless but who insist that it is formless. 
Trey point with preference to the polish of French 
scholarship, to French brilliancy and clearness. But 
this is an artificial prejudice created by those who see 
rrdy ihe es::es:er.:es :: Gtzzz.iz i::.:.i:±:.z sr.d r.:: ::s 
core. The dissertations of the apprentices may be 



THE EDUCATIONAL UNREST 51 

formless but the works of the German leaders have 
been masterful in their beautiful form. Above all, the 
true scholar knows that in science certainly the content 
must never be sacrificed to the form and that truly great 
work can never be created unless the work is based on 
the thorough and careful study of the detail. 

There may be still a third tendency noticed which 
seems to contrast with the so-called German method. 
Some parties miss in the technique of that new univer- 
sity method the liberalizing culture which was the 
leading trait of Oxford and Cambridge. This long- 
ing for the gentleman's scholarship after the English 
pattern has entered many a heart and is felt as an an- 
tithesis to those factory methods which seem inevitable 
in large parts of minute research. We know the 
beautiful plans for a graduate school of an eastern 
University: "Quadrangles enclosing sunny lawns, 
towers and gateways opening into quiet retreats, ivy- 
grown walls looking on sheltered gardens, vistas through 
avenues of arching elms, walks that wind among the 
groves of Academe — these are the answers in ar- 
chitecture and scenic setting to the immemorial long- 
ings of academic generations. . . ." These are the 
plans not for a school for highly specialized research 
but for a society of liberal and humanistic schol- 
ars where a cultured atmosphere and associations 
should work in an ideal way and should make the 



52 THE EDUCATIONAL UNREST 

students forget the burdens of the German method. 
And yet, however much we must welcome such dreams 
of repose in our noisy land, we cannot doubt that schol- 
ar';.- achievement would not lie on the path of amateur- 
ish devotion to scholarship. If we want scholarship, we 
must take it with all its rigorous demands, with its theo- 
retical abstractness and with its unfailing thoroughness. 
If this ideal of true scholarship is once accepted, it 
must have its influence on the whole intellectual life of 
education and schooling. This same antithesis of pure 
science and practical science plays its part in the discus- 
sion of our school men in a hundred forms. On die 
one side we see the insistent efforts to make the school 
lesson more and more practical, to connect everything 
with the daily occurrences, to transform the work into 
practical observation; and on the other side the effort 
to develop theory and logical thought in the growing 
pupils. May there not be more right on this latter 
side than the fashion of our day believes? Is there 
not indeed a danger that these new and ever new op- 
tical impressions flit through the mind without a last- 
ing value and that this handling of a hundred prac- 
tical things become play without learning ? Even the 
slightest experiment in order to be of real service to 
the mind, must be understood as a demonstration of a 
principle; that is to say, the theory must be underlying 
even* demonstration. We appeal by far too much to 



THE EDUCATIONAL UNREST 53 

the senses and while in this way we may make it easy 
for the boy and girl, and for the teacher too, we miss 
the real aim of intellectual development. 

Still more does it seem important for the school to 
take to heart that demand for thoroughness as 
against mere amateurishness and impressionism. Of 
course the thoroughness of the schoolboy cannot be that 
of the scholar. But the principle remains the same. 
Wherever the field of learning is entered, there must 
be a rigid demand that everything be done as well as 
it can be done. There is enough spirit of dash in the 
nation. What our public life and our private life de- 
mand is an additional spirit of thoroughness, and the 
contact with the world of knowledge is the great op- 
portunity to acquire it, if knowledge is approached in 
the right attitude. It is better to learn one thing thor- 
oughly than a dozen things superficially. The danger- 
ous belief that everybody can do everything and the 
disrespect for the wisdom of the expert will then slowly 
fade away. The carelessness of our school instruction 
to-day is often scandalous. The slapdash methods of 
spelling and mental arithmetic with which our boys and 
girls go from the grammar school into life are typical 
of the pedagogical calamity. 

Unnumbered other questions rush forward. Every- 
where we see opposing tendencies, outspoken or silent. 
Many of our university discussions are controlled by a 



54 THE EDUCATIONAL UNREST 

seeking for the right form of organization ; the underly- 
ing antithesis is self-government of the teaching body 
versus authority. Hardly any other problem of uni- 
versity life has provoked so much epigrammatic writing 
and so much practical experimenting in recent years. 
The misuses which flourish in certain places through the 
present traditional system can hardly be denied and while 
the character of the university presidency has changed 
greatly in the last half century, it seems an anomaly 
that the large universities are conducted with a frame- 
work of administration which was originally con- 
structed for the small colleges. The trustees who ap- 
point professors with the feeling that they may do 
frith them as with any hired clerks are probably dying 
out everywhere, but the more the professionally unin- 
formed trustees are obliged to lean on the president, 
the more an authority becomes centered in him which 
can be tolerable to the faculty members only if it is 
exerted with wisdom and sincere respect for the work 
of the scholar. In places where the president's lead- 
ing aim seems to be bigness and external growth and 
personal policy, the rumbling dissatisfaction can well 
be understood, the more as with such autocratic tend- 
encies of the presidential boss, the moral energy and 
self-reliance of the faculty members is quickly under- 
mined. The large university is then managed like a 
big commercial company and every outer gain means to 



THE EDUCATIONAL UNREST 55 

the nation a loss of internal values. Compromise plans 
have sprung up and have been tried repeatedly in re- 
cent years, and the present tendency indeed seems to 
be to give to the professors a certain official share in 
the appointment of new colleagues. Yet this too is cer- 
tainly a question which has its two sides. There are 
not a few who feel that the prevailing harmony and 
unity of our best university faculties may severely suf- 
fer, as soon as not problems of work but struggles about 
men become prominent in their discussions. Already 
the specialists everywhere are probably advisers of 
the administrative authorities, when the appointment 
of fellow specialists is in question. But the situation 
is very different if the advisers have to make final de- 
cisions and if whole faculties are drawn into the 
wrangle about various candidates. The dangers of a 
senatorial courtesy, of logrolling and nepotism, of 
breaking up into factions and the development of boss 
rule among scholars, of whom the least valuable ones 
would become the most skillful academic politicians are 
always imminent. If it is claimed against the present 
system that externalities are pushed into the fore- 
ground of the academic consciousness and the essen- 
tials too often forgotten, it may be more than doubtful 
whether any gain could be hoped for from pushing 
the scholars themselves into the administrative whirl. 
The standing argument of the friends of reform is the 



56 THE EDUCATIONAL UNREST 

case of the German universities. It has often been 
pointed out that in the German monarchy the universi- 
ties are thoroughly republican in their organization, a 
self-governing body of scholars, while in republican 
America the universities are monarchical, the instruct- 
ors being without official influence on the promotions 
and appointments. Yet while there is a germ of truth 
in this, it is an exaggeration. The rule of the German 
universities is that in the case of a vacancy, the profes- 
sors have to select three men as candidates for the place, 
and the government authorities, which correspond to the 
president and the trustees of the American universities, 
have to select one of the three. But firstly it cannot be 
denied that all those disadvantages of personal faction- 
ism, group forming for mutual help in semipolitical 
academic struggles, with all kinds of nepotism and 
prejudicial treatment, have set in through this right of 
the faculties and no longer disturb the university world 
simply because they are sanctioned by long tradition 
over there. But still more essential is another point. 
The government authorities are not really bound to re- 
spect those three propositions of the universities and 
the greatest periods of Prussian universities have been 
just those times in which the government had the cour- 
age not infrequently to disregard those wishes of the 
faculty. And where they preferred to yield, their ad- 
ministrative relation always gives them abundant 



THE EDUCATIONAL UNREST 57 

chance to exert pressure on a majority of the faculty 
to bring the name of the desired candidate into the 
official list. But certainly the demand for changes of 
some kind in the American system seems to grow stead- 
ily and in recent days it has not seldom been felt that 
a still greater danger than that of arbitrary appoint- 
ments lies in the possibility of reckless changes in schol- 
arly policy without any consultations with the true ex- 
perts. All this repeats itself on a miniature scale in the 
schools. The inferiority of the school boards in many 
a place is primarily a political question and not an ed- 
ucational one. But the relation of the teachers to the 
superintendents and school boards is decidedly an edu- 
cational problem and here too everything depends upon 
the equilibrium of the administrative and the teaching 
forces. 

We see practically the same antithesis in the rela- 
tion between pupils and teachers, the demand for self- 
government on the one side, for authority and disci- 
pline on the other. On the college level, as in the 
school, tendencies to strengthen the personal responsi- 
bility of the pupils alternate with tendencies to reenforce 
the power of authority. And all these struggling im- 
pulses may interfere with one another or help one an- 
other. Is it surprising that the total impression is one 
of educational nervousness and unrest? 



THE CASE OF THE REPORTER 



Tim essay first appeared in McClure's Magazine 



THE CASE OF THE REPORTER 

THE glory of our land has always been that its 
highest power is public opinion. Public opinion 
has made war and peace, has made laws and institu- 
tions, has shaped the whole national civilization. It 
is therefore the chief endeavor of the nation to bring 
everybody into contact with the sources of information, 
in order that public opinion may be well instructed. 
Progress in this direction has been wonderful. The 
amount of reading of newspapers which discuss public 
affairs surpasses that in any other country. The social 
reformer, however, can hardly overlook the other 
aspect; do those papers give to the masses sufficiently 
correct information for a well-organized public opin- 
ion to draw from it the naked facts? Of course, we 
are proud to have the newspapers illuminate every 
corner of the national workshop and throw their 
searchlight into the remotest fields; but, while the pa- 
pers speak about everything else, we forget that they 
have no reason to speak about themselves. Yet, if 
the country is governed by public opinion, and public 
opinion is largely governed by the newspapers, is it not 

6x 



62 THE CASE OF THE REPORTER 

most essential to understand who governs the news- 
papers? 

To be sure, everybody knows something of the 
economic influence of the owners and the still greater 
economic influence of the advertisers: everybody knows 
something as to the dependence of editorial writers 
upon national or state or municipal parties; the polit- 
ical and commercial influences on the papers that we 
read and on the coloring of their truths are on the 
whole no secret. The American, who likes to be in- 
dependent, has tried to protect himself against such 
unfair side-influences by disregarding the editorials 
more and more and by putting the whole emphasis 
on the reports of the facts themselves. It seems to be 
the general opinion that in the last three decades the 
editorial page has declined in its influence and the news 
parts have become the essential feature. The individ- 
uality of the great editorial writers has lost its hold 
on the attention of the public, and the vivid, living re- 
port of actual experiences has taken a firm grasp on 
the popular imagination. This focuses the interest of 
the social student on the reporter who supplies the 
news. Does the American reporter fulfill his task in a 
spirit that is helpful to the community? 

As a laboratory psychologist, I like to approach 
such questions, not by relying on general impressions 
or by developing theories that may be based on pre- 



THE CASE OF THE REPORTER 63 

conceived ideas; I am accustomed rather to study the 
objects that come under my own actual observation. I 
am therefore obliged to refer to my own insignificant 
experiences with reporters, because they alone are ex- 
actly known to me. In order not to allow any mis- 
takes of memory, I shall confine myself to rather recent 
experiences. I am on the whole in a favorable situ- 
ation to report on such observations. If the newspa- 
pers were to drag my name or my remarks into prac- 
tical politics or into commercial questions, it would be 
extremely difficult to demonstrate the right or wrong; 
any distortions might be made in the interest of a par- 
ticular party or of particular persons or of particular 
stock quotations. But all my concerns move in en- 
tirely neutral fields. Hence I can report about my re- 
porters with the same scientific indifference with which 
I should watch the subjects of my psychological ex- 
periments. 

I may begin with the most harmless type. Once 
when I was staying in New York I had the pleasure 
of reading in the morning papers an interview with me 
dealing with the inspiring problem of why rich people 
like to smuggle when they pass through the custom 
house on their return from Europe. The interview 
appeared as a telegram from Boston dated the pre- 
ceding night, in spite of the fact that I had been in 
New York a whole week. It interested me, since I 



6 4 THE CASE OF THE REPORTER 

had not said a word of it, and felt sure that I should 
have said it a little differently if I had ever been in- 
clined to gossip about a question that is no concern of 
mine. However, I remembered that, while I was in 
the midst of work in my Harvard laboratory some 
time before, a young man had come to ask me what I 
thought, from a psychological point of view, about the 
recent reports of smuggling. I told him — what I 
have said a hundred times to reporters — that I am 
not in the habit of giving interviews, and that I was 
not in the least interested in the question. Then 
he asked me whether I did not believe that the psycho- 
logical reason was this or that — I no longer remember 
what. I told him that I had no time to listen and that 
he might as well ask the elevator boy in his newspaper 
office as me. He left me, and I think nothing ap- 
peared in the Boston paper which had sent him. 
Nevertheless, several hundred thousand newspaper 
readers of New York got this interview in which his 
own psychological interpretation was neatly put into 
my mouth. 

A very deep, searching interview on the problem of 
the psychology of shoplifting had preceded this by only 
a few weeks, and was reprinted from Boston to San 
Francisco. It brought me an abundance of correspond- 
ence from friends who agreed and enemies who dis- 
agreed, and the only pity was that I had not said a 



THE CASE OF THE REPORTER Sjj 

word of all that nonsense. Of course I do not want to 
suggest that the sc-called interviews with me never have 
contained anything for which I am responsible. For 
instance, there was a beautiful case in the Sunday edi- 
tion of one of the best New York papers. The editor 
had sent a reporter to Boston in order to hear my views 
on a number of psychological and sociological ques- 
tions. I told the young man that I could not give him 
anything. The next Sunday there appeared a long 
interview, filling a third of a page, embellished by my 
portrait, and expressing my views in a conversation 
that seemed thoroughly intelligent. The promising 
young man had simply taken some of my books and 
copied half pages from various places, and dramatized 
them by breaking in with leading questions. For in- 
stance: " Doctor, what is your view on hypnotism ?" 
was answered by a page from my book on " Psycho- 
therapy." 

I remember one case in which I really said with my 
own lips what the newspaper printed. The conditions 
were these: A Boston newspaper sent a nice young 
fellow with the request that I accept a box at the first 
performance of a new psychologizing drama, expecting 
that I might say something about the play afterward. 
As a matter of course, I refused absolutely to think of 
that possibility. But, after this invitation had been 
delivered and rejected, the amiable messenger began in 



56 THE CASE OF THE REPORTER 

a melodious voice to ask whether I would allow him 
a few words that had nothing to do with his newspaper 
work. He said that he had read a book of mine which 
had suggested to him a psychological question, and 
asked whether I could not, for his personal information 
and education, answer this question. I told him that, 
if he could assure me that this was in no way an inter- 
view, I had no objection to explaining what he had not 
understood. He sat down and talked with an intelli- 
gent face, and I answered him as I would have an- 
swered the questions of any earnest student. The next 
day this whole conversation, with two very witty carica- 
tures, appeared in the newspaper, filling two columns. 
It ended by poking fun at the psychologist who was 
such a bad psychologist that he did not know when he 
was being interviewed, and saying that nothing was 
necessary to deceive him but to " speak the charmed 
words, * This is not an interview.' " Of course this 
rascal's product also moved slowly toward the Pacific 
Coast. 

To be sure, the case is not always so simple. Often 
the prettiest effects are reached when various reporters 
unintentionally help one another. Recently, for in- 
stance, in my psychological lecture course at Radcliffe 
College, I made a trivial little experiment that referred 
to the measurement of association times, an experiment 
like hundreds of others made in the same experimental 



THE CASE OF THE REPORTER 67 

course, and probably made in a similar way by a dozen 
colleagues in different colleges. There was absolutely 
nothing new in the experiment, and nothing important, 
as it was merely a simple little illustration of certain 
psychological facts. Probably one of the young woman 
students talked about it, distorting and exaggera- 
ting the details, and finally it reached some of the 
college reporters, who made a wonderful sensational 
story out of it, as to how I was reading the deepest 
secrets in a woman's mind. This was the first act. 
Naturally, this important event had to be wired all 
over the country, and the wittiest cartoonists drew me 
piercing into the brains of innocent women. But the 
second act followed quickly. A woman reporter in 
New York, deeply interested in the science of psychol- 
ogy, went to a well-known physician and asked his opin- 
ion about this nonsense that was reported concerning my 
experiments. The result was that the next day the in- 
terview of the physician with the New York reporter 
appeared, which was also at once wired all over the 
land. This interview as it stood was a criminal libel, 
which would have been utterly unjustified and absurd, 
even if the criticised story had been true. As a mat- 
ter of course this insulting interview was not only hope- 
lessly distorted but as the physician wrote to me " un- 
qualifiedly false." Yet hundreds of thousands read — 
and there are always readers who enjoy hearing one 



r 68 THE CASE OF THE REPORTER 

scholar call another a fool — all the falsehoods con- 
nected with my name. As was to be expected, another 
onrush of reporters was made to my house, and while 
I declined any personal interview, all kinds of threaten- 
ing remarks on my part were neatly served to the New 
York readers at their next breakfast. And these are 
only a few sample cases in my personal experience. It 
has been going on in this way for years. 

My pleasant experiences have not been confined to 
this country, for the European papers have delightfully 
seconded the wit of the American sheets. Once, when 
I made some psychological tests on a notorious criminal 
behind the walls of a penitentiary, the reporters in some 
way gained a knowledge of it. Several papers wired 
that they wanted a description of my experiments from 
me. In accordance with my habit, I politely refused 
this. But as the reporters continued to whet the appe- 
tites of the readers, the papers had to bring out some- 
thing. Accordingly, one of the largest New York 
papers asked some anonymous colleague of mine to 
write an essay on what a psychologist in such a case 
might possibly do to examine the criminal. The un- 
known author wrote a very fair article, in which he hap- 
pened not to describe one of those methods which I had 
used, but gave a full account of a number of instru- 
ments which might be used by an experimentalist in the 
study of hidden emotions. He showed pretty illus- 



THE CASE OF THE REPORTER 69 

trations of the sphygmograph and pneumograph for 
measuring the pulse and the breathing, such as appear 
in any physiological textbook. The New York report 
was wired to other places, with a slight change which 
made it appear that, instead of being the hypothesis of 
an anonymous writer, it was a fact that I had used those 
instruments. The next set of reporters transformed it 
into the statement that I had invented the instruments. 
At this stage the story went to London. The yellow 
press of England announced in big headlines that I had 
invented marvelous instruments by which the most 
secret ideas could be read. From there it spread 
throughout Europe in the form of an account of my 
" lying-machine." France especially took it up enthusi- 
astically. Lyric poems on the subject abounded. 
Scores of French humorists gave variations on the 
theme of the lover supplied with a lying-machine, while 
the serious papers described with great earnestness my 
revolutionizing invention of instruments which for 
three or four decades have been household apparatus 
in every physiological laboratory. 

Can I really be blamed, after experiences of this 
kind in my own humble sphere, if I cannot read any in- 
terview or report except with the underlying feeling 
that it is probably exaggerated, confused, or altogether 
invented? It has become a puzzle picture for me to 
seek the probable truth hidden in die confusing distor- 



70 THE CASE OF THE REPORTER 

tions. Yet this imaginative play of my friends, the re- 
porters, represents only one side of their gay sport. As 
long as they seek interviews, you can decline the honor, 
and at any rate you feel free from responsibility when 
the fake interviews appear. But they also report pub- 
lic affairs, speeches and discussions, and in these you 
cannot escape them. Here also I confine myself simply 
to my personal observations. The report is a hap- 
hazard reproduction in which the most important point 
is often left out, the most insignificant pushed into the 
foreground. Last winter I spoke at a New York ban- 
quet at which the list of official speakers contained four- 
teen wellknown names. The next day my speech was 
given in full, however much distorted, while all the 
other speakers were merely mentioned by name. Their 
speeches were much more interesting, at least to me ; but 
I happened to speak before ten oclock, and at ten the 
reporters left the hall. On another occasion I was one 
of three speakers. The other two speakers found their 
orations printed in full; my speech, which was the 
longest, was not even mentioned. I heard afterward 
that the other two had prepared their addresses in writ- 
ing, while I had no manuscript. The other day I gave 
a Phi Beta Kappa address, and one of the papers asked 
me beforehand for a written synopsis of it. I had the 
feeling that I really had a little message, and took the 
trouble to prepare a serious account of my sermon. 



THE CASE OF THE REPORTER 71 

But it was evidently not " newsy " enough, for the paper 
only printed the first meaningless introductory para- 
graph and left out the whole point. Yet the same 
paper had room enough in the same number to give a 
full account of ideas attributed to me as to the trapping 
of bank defaulters by psychological methods, a silly 
story which some crank devised. 

However, as long as the reporters only omit or re- 
port carelessly, the harm is not great. But those who 
have gone through the high school of reporterdom have 
acquired a new instinct by which they see and hear only 
that which can create a sensation, and accordingly their 
report becomes not only a careless, but a hopelessly 
distorted one. At a public gathering recently I spoke 
more than half an hour, and was frequently interrupted 
by loud expressions of approval. At the close of the ad- 
dress, the president of the organization expressed to me 
publicly his special thanks and there was long continued 
applause. In the course of my discussion I had made 
an insignificant remark about the theory of a well- 
known man, expressing my disagreement. The next 
day in the newspapers this least important feature was 
presented as the real content of my address. In inch- 
deep headlines the local papers brought out: " Pro- 
fessor M. attacks Mr. X." But that was only the be- 
ginning. Those who sympathized with Mr. X and 
who heard nothing but that I had " attacked " him, re- 



72 THE CASE OF THE REPORTER 

ported to their home papers the improved version that 
my speech had been frequently interrupted by hissing, 
and that at the end the public had given strong evidence 
of their disapproval by icy silence. 

Once — President Roosevelt was still in the White 
House — I spoke in the Middle West at a large ban- 
quet at a gentlemen's club to which I had been invited 
to discuss certain features of American public life. I 
spoke for nearly two hours; some prominent men of 
the city added a few friendly remarks : and it was late 
at night when the leading members, in a most jovial 
mood, accompanied me to my hotel. We all had the 
feeling that the banquet had been a most successful, 
harmonious affair. The next morning I was still fast 
asleep when citizens of the East read the startling news 
of my abhorrent misdemeanor, and the President of 
the United States sat down to write a letter of indig- 
nation. My Boston friends found a full length por- 
trait of me on the first page of their paper, with a chain 
around my neck on which the Declaration of Independ- 
ence was hanging. When I came down to breakfast, 
telegrams had already poured in from the Pacific Coast. 
This is what had happened. At one point in my ad- 
dress I said that it was interesting to note that President 
Roosevelt had never quoted the Declaration of Inde- 
pendence; at another point I said tha: President Roose- 
velt once made to me a certain observation, referring 



THE CASE OF THE REPORTER 73 

to an entirely trivial matter. The reporters had sim- 
ply connected these two facts and put a little ginger into 
it. They had wired over the land that I said in my 
speech that President Roosevelt himself told me that 
the Declaration of Independence was ridiculous. It 
was this news with which even the night rest of the 
President was interrupted. I never in my life had to 
send so many telegrams in one day as I did in order to 
correct that mischievous report. 

Of course the situation becomes still worse when 
newspaper men have their own little vanities or their 
own little vengeance. I got a noble taste of this when 
I went to Berlin as exchange professor. It had been 
my serious intention to use my German stay for the 
study of means by which the grotesque misrepresenta- 
tion of German aims in American newspapers might be 
cured. I had often heard the complaint that Ameri- 
can papers for mere convenience simply rely on the 
news as it is cabled from London, and that this English 
source gives much anti-German feeling to the reports 
of the day. But I soon discovered that this English 
coloring had a still deeper reason. I found that the 
majority of the American papers were served in Ger- 
many not by Americans but by Englishmen who had 
never set foot on American soil or by Americans whose 
chief function was to contribute daily to strongly anti- 
German London papers. I did not hide my surprise 



74 THE CASE OF THE REPORTER 

and my criticism stirred up anger in the quarters to- 
ward which it was directed. One of the true American 
reporters, with whom I had no fault to find, spoke a 
wise word of warning to me at that time. He said: 
"Be careful; every newspaper man knows that his 
chance is coming, if he only takes the time to wait." I 
replied laughingly that I should be careful and should 
not give them a chance. Three days later the two ex- 
change professors delivered their inaugural addresses 
before the university in the presence of the Emperor 
and the court. The next day some American papers 
brought out long cablegrams with the headline: 
" Munsterberg's Embarrassment!" The story ran 
that the Emperor had shown enthusiastic interest in the 
speech of my colleague but had snubbed me and clearly 
shown his disapproval. The invention was so absurd 
that later when the reports came back from America 
to Berlin, it occasioned great amusement and not least 
among those most immediately concerned. But the re- 
porters had made their chance. 

It would be ungrateful if I were not to acknowledge 
that at other times the reporters have done their very 
best to embellish me with glory and fame which I did 
not deserve. Within only a few weeks the newspapers 
conferred on me their great reward: my picture was 
printed large and small in all parts of the country, and 
with it went a full report of the noble fight which I 



THE CASE OF THE REPORTER 75 

had undertaken, the fight for the man of fifty. Hun- 
dreds of thousands feel dissatisfied because when they 
reach the half century mark they see that younger men 
are preferred to them and yet they have not dared to 
start the battle, but now with noble courage I stood 
up for them. It was no wonder that letters of thanks 
and of congratulation poured in on me. The truth 
of the whole story was that a Berlin physician, Dr. 
Kraus, had spoken in a German paper of the unwar- 
ranted prejudice of the Americans against men of fifty. 
This was wired to America. A Boston reporter — I 
do not even know from which paper — asked me one 
morning over the telephone whether Dr. Kraus has a 
good reputation in Germany, and I answered him 
politely that he is an excellent man and that he is 
acknowledged to be a reliable physician. This con- 
versation probably took less than two minutes, and yet 
hundreds of newspapers made me the hero who stands 
up for the man of fifty. Everything which Dr. Kraus 
had said was simply put into my mouth and in this form 
it was wired over the land. To be sure I was not long 
left in the position of triumphant leader, as some clever 
man discovered in " Who's Who " that I shall very 
soon be fifty myself, and then the whole story turned 
against me and my sly effort to make the people be- 
lieve that I shall not be antiquated when I am fifty. 
And the jokers were not lacking who claimed that my 



76 THE CASE OF THE REPORTER 

whole aim was to get a cheap life insurance, and comic 
cartoons gave their seal to it. 

I might go on with these experiences page after page. 
Yet my purpose is not to write reminiscences. I in- 
tended only to characterize different types of reporting, 
and these few samples, for which I might substitute 
scores of others from my short American career, may 
be sufficient to sketch the psychological situation. I 
have no reason to believe that my experiences are ex- 
ceptional. It is true, psychology appeals to the curios- 
ity of the masses perhaps a little more than Sanskrit, 
and because I have written on many subjects, the news- 
papers consider me as " good copy." But on the 
whole, my case is probably a typical one. Most of 
what is reported about me is distorted. How can I ex- 
pect that my fellow victims enjoy a better fate? 

Is any one to blame? Certainly not the reporters. 
They are doing what the newspapers want. And cer- 
tainly the newspapers are not to blame. They are 
doing what the public wants. And certainly the public 
is not to blame, for it does not take the matter seriously, 
but simply laughs about this heap of absurdities and 
gossip, of scandal and misinformation. And yet, is it 
really a tolerable situation? Where does it lead us? 
The newspapers themselves, and their reporters, must 
be constantly pushed further on this downward path. 
The more the public finds out that most of the news 



THE CASE OF THE REPORTER 77 

is only half true or quarter true, the stronger must be 
the sensations created in order to hold the attention of 
the incredulous reader. The accents must become 
louder, the colors more glaring. The language of 
truth is not loud enough; it must be drowned by the 
noise of vulgar inventions. The immediate result is 
that the individual reporter must become more and 
more reckless; his boldness carries the day. He no 
longer reports events; he influences their course by turn- 
ing the polite and moderate speech of a man into in- 
sulting attacks and violent statements, which naturally 
provoke heated replies. Instead of being the chron- 
icler of his time, the reporter becomes, by the mere 
tricks of his trade, a demagogue who pushes public 
opinion to extremes in every matter. The public which 
has insisted on disregarding the editorials because it 
wanted to form its own opinion on the basis of facts 
must now see that it is faring much worse; the facts 
themselves become distorted in a way that makes the 
reader's own judgment a plaything of the reporter. 

How does it work on the public? Le rot s f amuse; 
the public laughs. No one takes the trouble to correct 
any misstatement, no one defends himself, because 
everyone instinctively feels that his neighbor does not 
take it seriously. It is amusing to hear the gossip and 
to see even one's friends abused, and there can be no 
harm, as nobody believes any of it. But what is the 



78 THE CASE OF THE REPORTER 

social outcome? The necessary consequence is a uni- 
versal state of indifference. The public becomes in- 
different to the really important issues. 

And with this goes an indifference to accuracy and 
correctness. If the average man is constantly reading 
pages and pages with the feeling that the writer does 
not care whether it was so or not, if he finds daily that 
the events of to-day prove that the reports of yesterday 
must have been incorrect and confused, his whole men- 
tal life loses the instinct for exact distinctions. If we 
always moved in the illumination of late twilight, the 
lenses of our eyes would lose their power of accommo- 
dation to sharp outlines. There can be no doubt that 
lack of accuracy is one of the most serious faults of our 
social mind. Our entire educational system suffers 
from its looseness. Children leave school without 
ability to be careful in their spelling and mental arith- 
metic. Instead of thoroughness, we have only dash, 
and all practical life is harmed by this carelessness. 
Can there be anything more dangerous than this system- 
atic education for inaccuracy* by the reading of misre- 
porting newspapers? 

And finally, there must result an indifference to ac- 
cusation which undermines public morality. If the 
reader becomes accustomed to seeing the sharpest ac- 
cusations hurled against respectable persons, without 
anyone feeling discomfited because no one takes it seri- 



THE CASE OF THE REPORTER 79 

ously, an ethical indifference must follow which is a 
most fertile soil for corruption and actual immorality. 
The work of the social reformer demands sincere criti- 
cism, but the important inquiries of the leading maga- 
zines have demonstrated that careful, painstaking work 
is necessary to make such criticism valuable and help- 
ful. The haphazard onslaught of hasty reporters, the 
sensational distortions and grotesque exaggerations of 
everything that may serve to stir up the reader, creates 
an atmosphere in which just accusation becomes inef- 
fective. It becomes almost useless for serious investi- 
gators to study seriously actual social conditions, since 
the people have lost the power to discriminate between 
serious criticism and defamatory gossip. The time has 
come when a reaction must set in, when the public must 
insist on serious, accurate, significant information, and 
when the newspapers must stop the reckless reporter. 
If a complete overturning of our newspaper methods 
should take place, the better part of the population 
would be sincerely happy at getting rid of this flimsy 
fabrication and cheap mass of trivial news. But the 
very first necessity is to recognize how badly we are 
served, and how that for which we are really striving 
is entirely taken out of our reach. A public opinion 
that laughingly allows itself to be constantly misin- 
formed cannot be independent. It makes no difference 
whether it is misguided by a few great bosses or by 



80 THE CASE OF THE REPORTER 

ten thousand little reporter bosses. The case of the re- 
porter has not yet found the attention which it deserves 
in the fabric of our public life. 

We can say this with emphasis, and yet may be quite 
aware what a tremendous amount of industry and 
energy, of knowledge and cleverness, of personal sacri- 
fice and of personal sympathy is massed together in this 
work of the reporters' army. Among the American 
reporters I have met some of the brightest young men, 
and again some of the most tactful gentlemen, who 
would never use for publicity a personal conversation. 
But the alarming feature is that just these best and 
cleanest and finest specimens of the news-gathering pro- 
fession were the ones who in hours of frank discussion 
complained most bitterly of the public forces which 
against their own will push them on the paths of exag- 
geration and sensationalism and train in them instincts 
which are sapping their finest impulses. 



THE GERMANY OF TO-DAY 



This essay first appeared in the North American Review 



THE GERMANY OF TO-DAY 

THE American nation has become a world power 
and is therefore in steady contact with the coun- 
tries of Europe; the newspapers abound in reports 
from European lands; the army of travelers who spend 
their summer in Europe grows from year to year; the 
flood of European immigrants rises alarmingly — and, 
in spite of all, how little the average American knows 
of the true Europe and how easily misunderstandings 
and frictions arise from such ignorance! The differ- 
ence between the true picture and the caricature by the 
popular fancy seems in no case more astonishing than 
in that of Germany. The millions of German-Ameri- 
cans and the numberless family ties between America 
and the fatherland have not corrected the distorted 
views. Much of this prejudice against the Germans 
has come over from European sources; the continental 
cablegrams have usually gone through London, and 
have been retouched there by the professional spirit of 
anti-Germanism. Hence the Germans have too often 
been drawn as boisterous ruffians who were seeking to 
disturb the peace of the world. Some still imagine 

*3 



S 4 THE GERMANY OF TO-DAY 

Germany as a kind of softened Siberia with no popular 
government, no freedom, and no human dignity: others 
have heard that the Germans are dreamers, useless for 
the practical tasks of life; still others associate the pic- 
ture of a German with a foaming mug and, possibly, 
the long pipe; others with military drill and maltreat- 
ment of the poor soldier: yes, even when the better In- 
formed circles are consulted, vague prejudices are 
brought to light. German art and literature are said 
to be formless and uncouth; German scholarship is ac- 
cused of being narrow and dry: German social life 
lacks beauty and elegance: and German state life is con- 
trolled by the lasting desire to resist the movements to- 
ward peace. 

Not every one of such mischievous misconceptions 
can be uprooted by a flying automobile trip through the 
Rhine Valley from Cologne to Heidelberg, or by a few 
weeks in Berlin at a half-American hotel. To be sure, 
even the hasty visitor will soon discover that the much- 
maligned German policemen have nowadays nothing 
but politeness even for the most superfluous question, 
and that every new-fashioned restaurant gladly serves 
him with mineral water instead of beer; that the parlia- 
mentary debates for politically interested readers fill a 
much larger space in the German newspapers than any 
reports from Congress in America ; that even in the 
streets of* Berlin the sight of soldiers is. on the whole, 



THE GERMANY OF TO-DAY 85 

rare ; that the leading hostelries surpass in elegance any- 
thing known in Europe, and that the comfort of travel- 
ing can satisfy even the spoiled American. If the 
traveler happens to stay longer and really to enter into 
the spirit of German life and German culture, he feels 
more strongly from day to day how many of the dif- 
ferences from his native land are superficial and how 
many of the deeper features are common to both peo- 
ples. The whole rhythm of progress, the development 
of the cities with its achievements and its nuisances, the 
whole spirit of the land, then show him with increasing 
clearness the wellknown features of American life. 

Yet an underlying feeling remains in his mind that 
there are puzzling contradictions in German life, and 
while he has often heard that foreigners call his own 
country " a land of contrasts," he gains the distinct im- 
pression that Germany is still more such a land of con- 
trasting and contradictory tendencies. Nationalism 
and internationalism, hard work and esthetic enjoyment, 
individualism and anti-individualism, aristocracy and 
democracy, materialism and idealism, seem to fill all 
modern Germany with an inner struggle difficult to un- 
derstand. Hence, even among those who are willing 
seriously to enter into the spirit of the land, not a few 
feel confused and puzzled. They cannot find out what 
modern Germany is aiming at. They almost regret 
the passing of the old Germany which could so easily be 



86 THE GERMANY OF TO-DAY 

I 

brought to a simple formula, the schoolmaster Germany 
before the days of German empire and German indus- 
trialism. But all these energies, apparently so contra- 
dictory, may ultimately make up a well-organized and 
unified national character. These seeming contradic- 
tions may fundamentally be two aspects of a deeper 
unity, and he who examines earnestly these great con- 
trasting forces in German life must finally discover that, 
in different forms and under somewhat different cultural 
conditions, after all, the same energies are shaping 
modern America too. 

To begin at the beginning, the modern German is 
thoroughly nationalistic. This has not always been so, 
and to those who know Germany only through its clas- 
sical literature and its cosmopolitan atmosphere, the 
change often seems striking. Its newness, of course, 
sometimes leads to exaggeration, but it would be utterly 
wrong to speak of German chauvinism. It has rightly 
been said that chauvinism is, anyhow, nothing but the 
patriotism of other peoples; though, indeed, a type of 
patriotism does exist which is intolerant and which 
lacks internal respect and earnest acknowledgment of 
the value of other countries. Nothing is further from 
the German attitude. Certainly the modern German 
is proud of his fatherland and its achievements, of its 
industry and of its army, of its scholarship and of its 
music, but he is supremely interested in all that other 



THE GERMANY OF TO-DAY 87 

nations do; and if perhaps he sometimes claims that his 
thoroughness of work is unsurpassed in the world or 
that his sentiment comes from deeper sources, he is cer- 
tainly no less aware of how much he lacks some ten- 
dencies and faculties which he admires in others. 

The German nationalism is the loyal belief in the 
mission of the German spirit in the world. As such it 
is, indeed, a vehement protest against the cosmopoli- 
tanism which Germany's poets and thinkers upheld at 
a time of political weakness. When Germany's politi- 
cal power was paralyzed, the thoughts of the best men 
played with a philosophic humanism which was to stand 
above political citizenship. In their speculative dreams 
man as a rational being seemed hampered and subdued 
by the narrowness of ties of the state and of national 
conditions of life. The ideal seemed to be to forget 
the provincialism of all which separates man from man 
and to enter with the whole heart into the citizenship of 
the world. 

This colorless and characterless cosmopolitanism has 
been swept away by the enthusiasm for the German 
Empire. It did not yield at once to the historic atti- 
tude which is the controlling force to-day. The first 
decades of the new Germany were deeply influenced by 
the immense progress of naturalistic sciences. The bio- 
logical question of racial descent and racial conflicts 
stood in the foreground and disturbed more than it ac- 



88 THE GERMANY OF TO-DAY, 

centuated the joy in the German unity, as Germany, 
like every other nation, is a mixture of many different 
racial elements. But the new century has brought a 
decided reaction against this naturalistic influence. The 
idea of the nation as a state has carried the day. Not 
a German race is to be perpetuated; but a nation of 
men who are filled with German ideals and who believe 
in the German task, is to be strengthened and served 
by the patriot. This new emotional attitude brings a 
new life to everything in which German historical tra- 
dition is living and a new joy in every advance which 
shows a characteristically German stamp. It has given 
strength to the German political striving, and, although 
far from any imperialistic vaingloriousness, it demands 
a strong army and navy. 

The apparent contrast to all this lies in the strong 
international interest which can be felt throughout Ger- 
many. It is no longer that old, often ridiculed desire 
of the Germans to imitate the foreigner and to over- 
estimate everything which comes from without the 
boundaries of the land. That was the most unpleasant 
byproduct of the cosmopolitan Germany which has dis- 
appeared. The German language itself is witness of 
the effort to uphold pure German against the influx of 
foreign idioms. It is too little noticed what a change 
has come to the German style within the last 
twenty years, and how the words of foreign origin 



THE GERMANY OF TO-DAY 89 

are instinctively replaced by words of German root. 
Yet the German has not lost his decided talent 
for entering into the spirit of foreign nations. He 
easily learns the foreign languages, feels at home 
in foreign literatures, and when he travels adjusts 
himself without effort — often by far too easily 
— to the nations he visits. Throughout history 
the Germans have for this reason often played the 
role of natural mediators. Through their influence the 
various nations have come into contact; and this spirit 
of internationalism is as vivid to-day as it ever was. 
At Berlin University are two thousand foreign students ; 
in the German playhouses the dramatic literature of 
the world finds a genuine appreciation ; German scholar- 
ship seeks the closest contact with the research of all 
nations; German commerce is helped by nothing more 
than by the readiness of the Germans to settle for a 
while in foreign lands, and just the newest Germany 
furnishes more globetrotters than any other country. 

All this finds its background in a most serious love 
for international peace on the part of the German na- 
tion. The outsiders forget that Germany has now had 
unbroken peace for over forty years, and that the Em- 
peror who was denounced as a warlord has been on 
the throne for twenty-five years without drawing 
the sword. Certainly the German nation loves its 
army and considers the years of military service as a 



9 o THE GERMANY OF TO-DAY 

fine schooling for manhood and as a splendid training 
in that discipline which gives backbone to the whole 
public life. Above all, living in the center of Europe, 
east and west tightly pressed by excitable neighbors, it 
knows that a strong army is the only safe insurance 
against national dangers and destruction. But the 
same German populace which is proud of its army has 
the strongest desire that there be no need of its being 
led to the battlefield. To be sure, German patriotism 
still mourns at the thought that the globe was divided 
among the great nations before Germany came to unity 
and strength, and that as a result Germany's colonies 
are unimportant compared with those of some other 
leading nations. Xor will Germany ever forget the 
warning of the favorite poet of the masses, the outcry 
of Schiller, that infamous is the nation which does not 
sacrifice everything for its honor. But the Germans of 
to-day know how easily any trivial quarrel can be made 
to appear an issue of honor to the hysteric element of 
a nation. They see clearly that the most fortunate war 
would be a disturbance of Germany's steady, sound 
development, while an unfortunate war would ruin 
everything. It is true that there is less heard in Ger- 
many than in America about the systematic agitation 
for peace. The peace societies have no considerable 
influence in German public life, there are no powerful 
promoters, and no Carnegie helps their cause. But 



THE GERMANY OF TO-DAY 91 

this certainly does not indicate a weaker love for peace ; 
it indicates an instinctive feeling that in the complicated 
situation of European rivalries mere declamations about 
disarmament cannot help the cause of peace in the least. 
There is even a widespread sentiment that the direct 
discussion of peace has its elements of danger. Peace 
is something negative ; it means the absence of fighting 
and war, and all the pacificatory debates drag the idea 
of war and fighting constantly into the midst of the 
popular imagination. Such ideas, which so easily ap- 
peal to the lower instincts of man and to his most excit- 
able layers of emotions, may become causes for the ex- 
citements which they aim to suppress. The conditions, 
however, which really work toward the conservation of 
European peace become more stable and firm in Ger- 
many from year to year. The strong new nationalism 
and patriotism with all its pride in the German army 
and its contempt for a weak cosmopolitanism is not at 
all in contrast but ultimately in deepest harmony with 
this peace-loving internationalism which acknowledges 
and respects the characteristics of every other nation. 
Is this doubleness of mind really strange to the Ameri- 
can social consciousness? Is not the American mind 
also deeply filled with the patriotism which believes in 
battleships and at the same time with the sincere, deep- 
rooted love for peace? 

The most striking change, however, which has come 



92 THE GERMANY OF TO-DAY 

to the new Germany is the unprecedented development 
of its material life, which seems in direct contrast with 
Germany's claim for preeminence in idealistic endeav- 
ors. If a German had left Berlin at the beginning of 
the eighties and returned to-day without having seen 
the capital in the meantime, he would hardly recog- 
nize the modest city of the time of the old emperor. 
Berlin has become rich and luxurious, and every city of 
the empire and almost every small town repeats this im- 
pression given by the metropolis. It has been the 
change from agrarian Germany to industrial Germany. 
In the beginning of the eighties more than two hundred 
thousand Germans went to America as emigrants every 
year, as the German soil was not rich enough to sup- 
port them. Since that time the population has grown 
rapidly, and yet the emigration has gone down to a tenth 
part of that earlier figure because the industrialized 
life gives to the sixty-three millions a comfortable sup- 
port; there are no slums in any German city. The 
change is a fundamental one, and this means that it has 
revolutionized not only the street life and the shop- 
windows, the hotels and the private homes, the places 
of amusement and the comfort of traveling, but that 
it has changed the inner attitude of the German mind. 
That Germany which seems old-fashioned to the 
younger generation considered the economic life and 
all which had to do with business and trade and com- 



THE GERMANY OF TO-DAY 93 

merce and industry as something of second rank, more 
or less as a necessary evil. The strongest, best elements 
of the social organization, the intelligent boys of well- 
to-do families became officers and lawyers, scholars and 
physicians, government employes and land-owners, but 
they looked down on the calling of the business man 
and on all technical activities. To-day in exactly these 
social groups the callings of the lawyer and of the officer 
have somewhat lost in attractiveness, and the lifework 
of the banker, of the business man, and of the manu- 
facturer, and above all the technical professions have 
risen rapidly in the general estimation. It is clear that 
this involves a circle : the prosperity of the land draws 
the best elements into wealth-producing activities, and 
it is just this support by the best and strongest minds 
which works most directly toward the increase of Ger- 
many's prosperity. Moreover, it is characteristic of 
this new commercial period that the long inhibited spirit 
of enterprise comes to its own. In England and in 
France the population saves its wealth, and the national 
capital therefore gives a relatively small interest. In 
Germany, as in the United States, the new income is 
at once put into new undertakings with all their risks, 
and hence in both lands the population gains the highest 
dividends. The representatives of industry and com- 
merce have gained a social importance in new Germany 
which the preceding generation would not have under- 



94 THE GERMANY OF TO-DAY 

stood. The rapid spread of sport and sport interests, 
which presupposes abundant means, has become one of 
the most effective vehicles of the social changes. Even 
the modest householder who in previous times hardly 
thought of a little vacation now knows that the whole 
family must go to a summer resort for long weeks, and 
he who is better off and who in earlier times traveled 
to the Rhine must now visit Norway and Egypt and 
take a trip to St. Moritz or the Riviera in the middle 
of the winter. 

Such a change is not to everybody's liking. Many 
do not want to forget the life of the time when Ger- 
many was poor but when its philosophy and literature 
were flourishing and the world looked on the Germans 
as dreamers and thinkers. They liked the queer streets 
of Weimar better than the avenues of Berlin West. 
But it would be utterly wrong to claim that Germany in 
the garments of wealth has become disloyal to its his- 
toric tradition. Does not the art of the Renaissance 
show the beauty and splendor of the German life of 
the past? The Thirty Years War of the seventeenth 
century destroyed the prosperity of the land and for 
two centuries threw the fatherland into a state of pov- 
erty in which economy became the most necessary virtue, 
and a one-sided overestimation of the spiritual became 
the natural comfort in the physical distress. The days 
of the German Hansa were days of commercial pride. 



THE GERMANY OF TO-DAY 95 

Now these old jubilant feelings of prosperity begin to 
revive again. But, just as in the glorious times of the 
Renaissance the life in wealth was most harmoniously 
connected with the life in beauty and with the highest 
appreciation of scholarship and art and literature, this 
new turn to commercial strength again seeks its expres- 
sion in idealistic endeavors. It is not true, as the critics 
hastily claim, that this new comfort brings with it the 
vices of the parvenu, sensual materialism, and lack of 
higher standards; it is not true that Germany becomes 
unfaithful to its great traditions in the ideal realms, be- 
cause it has ceased to be the poor underpaid and under- 
fed schoolmaster of the world. On the contrary, the 
greater means of the land allow an expansion of the joy 
in art and music and drama such as has not been known 
before. The institutions for scholarship and research 
are multiplying on an unprecedented scale, and the 
alarmingly increasing number of new books which ap- 
pear yearly in Germany indicates surely that the new- 
fashioned sports have not driven out the old-fashioned 
German sport of writing. He who looks to the deeper 
processes in the national life even discovers the begin- 
ning of a great idealistic movement in the younger gen- 
eration. In philosophy and literature, in politics and 
art and religion, the mere naturalism and realism seem 
to be losing ground and to be yielding to a new romanti- 
cism. In the universities the philosophical lecture-rooms 



96 THE GERMANY OF TO-DAY. 

which were for a long time neglected again attract the 
scholars of to-morrow. There has come a kind of re- 
action against the mere collecting of facts and gather- 
ing of scientific data. A longing for wide perspectives 
and for unified views of the world begins a new reign. 
The eccentricities of the realistic drama have given 
place to exquisite poetry; the naturalistic stage-setting 
which was the pride of twenty years ago has been re- 
placed by symbolistic stage effects which speak to the 
imagination through color and suggestion. The whole 
field of social problems has become the working-ground 
for a genuine, enthusiastic, ethical idealism entirely un- 
known to the older time which had not discovered its 
social responsibilities. 

On the surface, to be sure, it looks more as if pleas- 
ure-seeking were the central aim. The stranger who 
comes to a German city is amused and sometimes even 
morally shocked by the abundance of dining-places and 
restaurants, cafes and beer gardens, which seem crowded 
from the morning hours to the early hours of the next 
morning. These German people seem to have nothing 
to do, they do not keep meal hours, but seem to dally 
away their days in light talk and light beverages. The 
same gayety fills the amusement places of a thousand 
types, the variety shows and the sport palaces, the cir- 
cuses and the dancing halls. This artificial pleasure- 
seeking of the city dwellers is even outdone by the natu- 



THE GERMANY OF TO-DAY 97 

ral enjoyments of the people in every town and every 
hamlet. Whatever the source of their merriment may 
be, they seem to live in joy and in fun, taking life easily. 
Yes: there is no nation which has learned so well the 
one lesson which America has not yet learned, to gain 
true satisfaction from pleasure. 

It is this life-enjoying side of the nation's character 
which has given to love and to the play of love such a 
surprisingly large place in the national culture. This 
is repeated on every level. The coarse and vulgar imi- 
tation of love has found an expansion which makes the 
night life of Berlin almost unique in the world. The 
Americans who formerly flocked to Paris as the gayest 
city have known for some years that the voluptuous tur- 
moil of the Friedrichstrasse outshines all the capitals 
of Europe to-day. But every salon, every festival, 
shows the same playful indulgence in the game of the 
senses. No doubt much of the spirit of the rococo time 
has arisen again with all its tender fancies, with its 
silken waistcoats, and its hand-kissing cult, and with 
all its hidden symbols of erotic emotion. The visitor 
who strolls through the streets and looks over the dis- 
play in the windows of the numberless bookstores is 
surprised at the abundance of books on sexual questions. 
It seems as if all Germany had nothing else in mind but 
love-making and love-giving and love-abusing; and this 
means that it appears like a country of leisure. 



98 THE GERMANY OF TO-DAY 

Even in the sphere of highest cultural interests this 
remoteness from the cares of the busy day is everywhere 
apparent. There is no greater contrast than labor and 
art. Labor aims to change this world of brutal facts, 
and connects every effort with practical needs. Art 
seeks to make man forget the demands of practical life 
and sink with his whole heart into a beautiful appear- 
ance which is separated and cut off from the events of 
surrounding reality. The German evidently lives in 
this unreal world and wants to be enmeshed in the ar- 
tistic creation. Berlin alone heard last winter fourteen 
hundred formal concerts, and to the Germans the ever- 
new efforts of the dramatic stage do not mean simply 
entertainments to fill an empty evening, but the most 
important affairs of life. The beautiful illusion which 
does not allow any intruding work appears more essen- 
tial than the practical setting of a laborious existence. 
In Germany not girls alone read lyrics and visit the 
painting exhibitions. Esthetic enjoyment seems the 
deepest life-element of the happy nation. Is such a 
nation really able to do hard work and to fight its bat- 
tles of industry? 

Yet the expert who travels through Germany, who 
visits her workshops and her mills, her seaports and her 
commercial centers, her mines and her farms, is never 
in danger of being troubled by such a doubt. At every 
turn of his road he feels with certainty that this is a 



THE GERMANY OF TO-DAY 99 

nation at work, an army of laborers. The story of, 
Germany's assiduous efforts in the fields of education 
and science, of art and thought, has always been famil- 
iar to the world. But the outsiders know too little of 
the dogged earnestness with which the producers of 
wealth have gone to work and carried out their task. 
The American is too easily inclined to measure this" 
economic achievement only by its final outcome as com- 
pared, perhaps, with the production of the United 
States. But if the value of the personal factor is cor- 
rectly to be estimated, it is most important to recognize 
the fundamental difference in the economic setting of 
the two peoples. The Americans live in a gigantic 
country thinly settled in most parts and with treasures 
of nature which until recently appeared inexhaustible. 
The Germans live in a small land with little elbow 
room for the population and on a poor soil with scanty 
gifts of nature. In America there are less than nine 
inhabitants to the square kilometer of ground, in Ger- 
many about one hundred and fifteen to the square kilo- 
meter. When the German Empire was founded in 
1871, 540,777 square kilometers were occupied by a 
population which amounted to seventy-five inhabitants 
to the square kilometer, less than forty-one million 
people. There had been a steady increase in the Ger- 
man nation before the foundation of the empire; in 
1 85 1 there were only thirty-six millions on the same 



ioo THE GERMANY OF TO-DAY 

ground. But with the new political strength the in- 
crease became more rapid. The year 1900 brought it 
to fifty-six million, the year 19 10 to sixty-five million. 
The grain products of the fields at the time when the 
German Empire arose were sufficient to feed those forty 
million, and there still remained some grain for export. 
Five million more hungry people could not find their 
bread on German soil. Yet the sixty-five million of 
to-day live incomparably better than the forty million 
of forty years ago. The whole standard of living has 
been raised on every social level. The modest com- 
fort of the laboring population and the luxury of the 
rich both surpass the dreams of the foregoing genera- 
tion; and yet no precious metals have been discovered 
in the German mines, no cotton could be raised in its 
fields, no coal and iron beyond the internal needs of the 
nation have been found. All this change has come 
through German energy, and without fear the German 
nation looks forward to the days when eighty or a hun- 
dred million will live within the narrow boundaries on 
its ungrateful soil. It is true that Germany has to im- 
port much of its food and has to bring from far dis- 
tances its cotton and silk and much of its iron and cop- 
per, of its wool and its oil, of its wood and its fur, of 
its coffee and its tobacco. But it has ample means to 
pay with the products of labor by mind and body, as 
the agrarian State has changed into an industrial coun- 



THE GERMANY OF TO-DAY 101 

try which may import much raw material, but which 
can export the finished products of organized activity. 
During the year 19 10 Germany's total foreign com- 
merce amounted to 17,614 million marks, while that 
of the United States, expressed in marks, was only 
13,871 million, that of France 10,212 million, 
Russia 5,047 million, and only Great Britain over- 
towered by the figure of 24,741 million. The in- 
crease has been steady; in 1905 Germany's foreign 
commerce amounted to 13,507 million marks, in 19 10 
to 11,088 million. Every statistical record shows how 
the new Germany has succeeded in a fight against tre- 
mendous odds. It has become rich in spite of a growth 
of population which no longer allowed it to feed itself 
with the product of its own fields, in spite of meager 
natural resources, and in spite of a geographical politi- 
cal situation which has forced the nation to carry gigan- 
tic burdens for military and naval preparations for the 
hour of danger. What are the forces in the make-up 
of the modern Germany which have secured this sur- 
prising success? 

The student of social psychology cannot overlook the 
fact that very different tendencies have cooperated to- 
ward it, tendencies which seem to a certain degree con- 
tradictory and which indeed belong to very different 
sides of the German personality; tendencies, moreover, 
some of which are shared with the American economic 



102 THE GERMANY OF TO-DAY 

worker and some of which are thoroughly un-Amer- 
ican. For instance, the German shares with his 
American rival the spirit of enterprise which has con- 
tributed so much to the often feverish industrialization 
and which has drawn the German business man out into 
the world and has built up the German foreign trade. 
But at the same time the German believes in and 
loves an economy which does not allow the least waste 
and which tries to make use of the smallest byproducts, 
a trait which appears to the typical American as con- 
trary to the spirit of enterprise. The American would 
feel that such consideration of the small meant small- 
ness, and that such petty carefulness would paralyze 
the great undertakings. In the German temperament 
economy and enterprise are intertwined. Yet they are 
of quite different origin in the nature of the German 
people. The economic tendency has resulted from a 
protracted period of suffering. The misery which the 
Civil War brought to the Southern States was insig- 
nificant compared with the devastation which the Thirty 
Years War in the seventeenth century inflicted on Ger- 
many; while the new South began to prosper after a 
few decades, nearly two centuries were necessary to 
bring back the flourishing conditions of the past in Ger- 
many. 

In those periods in which Germany had raised 
itself to unprecedented heights in literature and philos- 



THE GERMANY OF TO-DAY 103 

ophy, the people had to school themselves in economic 
modesty and carefulness. The Germans of the six- 
teenth century had been lavish, especially in the com- 
mercial centers, but the long training in national pov- 
erty entirely eradicated that trait; and, while in the last 
two decades with the new wealth a new education for 
economic splendor has set in, the people as a whole 
still remain fundamentally frugal and, above all, ab- 
horrent of all waste. In this respect the development 
has been exactly the opposite in American experience. 
In a land with unlimited treasures the people fancied 
that it was the greatest economy of energy to waste the 
gifts of nature, until only recently the national con- 
science awoke. This painstaking German economy has 
contributed enormously to the success in the material 
struggle of the young empire. Whoever compares the 
German methods of building dams across the valleys 
in order to save every fertilizing drop of water with 
American extravagance must be deeply impressed with 
the beneficial result of this hard training of the German 
nation. But the same disposition shows its effects in 
every simple business concern and in every humble 
household. It is an old experience that in the German 
kitchen nourishing and appetizing courses are prepared 
from material which the American housewife would 
throw away; and the impulse of the German woman 
would resist the capricious demands of the American 



io 4 THE GERMANY OF TO-DAY 

fashion which discards almost new garments be- 
cause they are slightly out of style. The spirit of en- 
terprise, on the other hand, is the inherited gift of the 
Teutonic peoples. It was for a long while subdued by 
the narrowness of the external conditions, but it has 
come to its own again with the joy in the new empire; 
and the same longing which made the Germans eager 
to cross the frontiers and the oceans has stirred them 
to pioneer work in every field of human activity. 

But economy and enterprise would not have secured 
the actual results if the German had not an inborn de- 
light in industrious activity. He loves his amusements 
in his leisure hours and can be happy with most naive 
pleasures. But he knows that work is work and that 
it should be done with the best efforts of the whole per- 
sonality. This instinct is not a matter of chance; it is 
a product of systematic education. It is a favorite and 
natural dogma of democracy that man as far as possi- 
ble ought to be free and that discipline ought, therefore, 
to be reduced. This, no doubt, has its advantageous 
sides for the development of the future citizen whose 
spirit of independence will be stimulated early through 
an education which gladly eliminates everything, that 
does not suit the taste and liking. But it also has its 
grave dangers. It brings superficiality into the human 
life; and America is beginning to discover that a youth 
who never has learned to be obedient will not be obedi- 



THE GERMANY OF TO-DAY 105 

ent to his own demands. America substitutes for this 
early educational discipline at first sport with its rigid 
demands, and later an overvaluation of money, which 
stimulates the working energies to their maximum. In 
Germany a systematic education with sharp training 
and hard discipline early inculcates into every mind a 
habit of hard work. This energy for doing one's duty 
in spite of all selfish temptations is, moreover, greatly 
strengthened by the years of military service, the great 
national high school of labor and disciplined effort. 
Just as the social and hygienic value of a free Sunday 
can be considered without any reference to religion, the 
economic value of the obligatory military service can 
be considered without any reference to peace and war. 
As a training time for energetic regulated activity the 
German army life is of unsurpassed value to the nation. 
One other feature which has contributed not the 
smallest part to the success of German economic life is 
the product of school training, too — namely, the be- 
lief in expert knowledge. American development for 
a long while pointed in another direction. The demo- 
cratic conviction is always at first that everybody is fit 
for every position and that an energetic, clever fellow 
can handle any proposition which the day may bring. 
The political structure of the land made it necessary 
that the cabinet ministers and the ambassadors, every 
rural postmaster and every custom-house officer, and in 



106 THE GERMANY OF TO-DAY, 

municipal service every mayor and every department 
chief, be found among men who never had had any 
training in the particular line of work. This political 
principle has strongly affected the instinctive attitude 
of the people in every sphere. Commercial and in- 
dustrial life in America show the traces of this senti- 
ment everywhere. In no other country do men go so 
often and so easily from one life activity to another, or 
step into business with so little specialized preparation. 
Only the last period of American civilization indicates 
a change. The growing complexity and the fierceness 
of the rivalry have slowly convinced the nation that 
even the most brilliant dash cannot always be substi- 
tuted for the thoroughness of specialized training. 
From year to year the expert has more and more come 
to his own in American life. In Germany exactly the 
opposite principle was the starting-point. The entire 
political organization demanded firm and fixed careers 
controlled by examinations for the governmental serv- 
ice on every level. 

This belief, deeply ingrained in the German mind, 
has shaped the whole German commercial world too. 
A man sticks to his specialty, and no one but a specialist 
is welcome for a responsible position. This idea that 
everything depends upon a thorough preparation has 
often, even against heavy odds, secured advantages for 
Germany in the market-places of the world. The 



THE GERMANY OF TO-DAY 107 

young German business man who goes to foreign 
shores has certainly prepared himself at home for his 
task by a serious study of the language and usages of 
his prospective customers, and he brings with him his 
price-lists carefully translated into the foreign idiom. 
No country in the world has based its technical indus- 
tries on such broad foundations of thorough scholar- 
ship. Some industrial chemical establishments have in 
their employ several hundred scientific chemists who are 
exclusively engaged in scientific research. This scien- 
tific spirit alone has brought the German cultivation 
of the fields to its present intensiveness which compen- 
sates for the character of the soil. Agricultural 
academies and agricultural schools on all levels of 
scholarship and in all branches of agricultural knowl- 
edge have spread their thorough preparation to the 
remotest farms. The young factory employe receives 
a similar training in the specialistic technical continua- 
tion schools. Everywhere theory leads to a deeper 
grasp of the practical requirements. Europeans out- 
side of Germany like to tell the story of an Englishman, 
a Frenchman, and a German who agreed to inform 
themselves about the hippopotamus, and for that pur- 
pose the Englishman traveled to Egypt, the Frenchman 
went to the zoological garden in Paris, and the German 
went to the library. Everyone has laughed at the 
role which the poor German plays there with his schol- 



io8 THE GERMANY OF TO-DAY 

arly pedantry, but, seriously speaking, there can be 
hardly any doubt that after a short time the German 
would know far more about the hippopotamus than the 
other two. This German desire to make the mind in- 
dependent of the personal chance impression and to 
substitute for the accidental the general which contains 
the experience of the whole race, has given to German 
labor much of its present ability to be successful in com- 
petition with much more favored countries. In short, 
the state and the individuals, the laws and the longings, 
the institutions and the emotions of the millions work 
together to make the Germany of to-day a tremendous 
working machine destined to success by hard labor— i 
the same Germany which seems so freely given over to 
pleasure-seeking and aesthetic enjoyment. 

One more apparent conflict in the modern Germany 
may be pointed out, and here it may be less possible to 
acknowledge the two sides as a twofold aspect of an 
underlying unity. Here we have a real inner contrast 
which is responsible for a certain unrest in the German 
life. But just this unrest is a condition for progress. 
The contrast is that between the belief in the rights of 
the individual and the belief in the rights of the com- 
munity. The words alone would suggest that the same 
holds true of American life, but that would be mislead- 
ing. The relation of the individual to his individual 
neighbor and to the nation as a whole is in America' 



THE GERMANY OF TO-DAY 109 

very different from the German attitude. It might al- 
most be said to be the reverse. Might we not hold that 
the whole development of America has been controlled 
by the conviction that the highest value lies in the in- 
dividual? This was the Puritanic belief; this was the 
belief of the English law; ultimately the whole State 
and its organization has meaning and importance only 
in so far as it serves those millions of single individuals. 
Their freedom, their welfare, their spiritual growth, is 
the aim and end of everything in the national life. But 
while the right of the individual to welfare and perfec- 
tion is the highest goal for the American, he tries to 
reach this end by subordinating himself to a community 
in which he aims to be as similar as possible to all the 
other members. His individuality is for him a center 
of his rights, but these rights are no different from the 
rights of his neighbors in the community. The whole 
American life with its longing for self-initiative and 
self-assertion, and yet with its subordination to the pub- 
lic opinion, to the fashion, to the taste of the masses, 
can be understood from this point of view. With the 
German it is just the opposite. For him the final aim 
is never the individual; his aim is the life and progress 
of the community, not as a mere summation of millions 
of individuals, but as an independent unity. The 
American would call it a mere abstraction, or even a 
mystical fancy, but the whole German life is controlled 



no THE GERMANY OF TO-DAY 

by this "belief in the real existence of the general mind 
as against the individual mind. To the German, 
science and art and religion and state are realities which 
everybody has to serve without any reference to per- 
sonal men. He is loyal to them as ideals and not as 
means to serve any individuals in. the world. This ab- 
stract community is the real goal of interests and the 
claims of any individuals must be subordinated to it. 

On the other hand, this service to the rights of the 
community, this living for state and art and science and 
religion and progress is to be achieved by every one 
in his particular way. This to the German is the mean- 
ing of his individuality. It is not a source of special 
rights to him, but a source of special duties. All his 
particular gifts and tendencies must come to expression ; 
he is not to fulfill the task just as his neighbor does, but 
he must feel that he is expressing himself in his incom- 
parable uniqueness, and he demands that his neighbor 
also do it in his own way. His subordination to 
others means to him a prostitution of his eternal right 
to his inborn personality. 

This fundamental German demand that each one do 
his share in his particular way gives to the German life 
its incomparable manifoldness and inner variety. No 
one will for a moment deny that virtues and vices lie 
near together in this, and that this feature of the typi- 
cal German often leads to intolerable stubbornness 



THE GERMANY OF TO-DAY in 

which paralyzes effective cooperation. All his little 
likes, and especially his little dislikes, his prejudices, and 
his moods must find their particular expression too. 
Every association becomes broken up in discordant 
groups, and in each group are as many opinions as 
members ; every great party crumbles into smaller units 
because no one will give up the least fraction of his pro- 
gramme. This is, to be sure, a prolific source of per- 
haps unnecessary conflict. Any compromise appears a: 
sin against the loyalty to one's convictions. A two- 
party system in politics would be unthinkable for Ger- 
many. The equilibrium in the German Reichstag is 
given essentially by four large groups, the Conserva- 
tives, the Liberals, the Clerical Catholics — the so- 
called Centrists — and the Socialists, but no effort to 
bring the Liberals, for instance, into one closed party 
has succeeded. They are separated into three smaller 
parties, and the Conservatives are likewise made up of 
three independent parties. Finally this manifoldness 
becomes more complicated by the special parties of the 
Polish, the Danish, and the Alsace-Lorraine groups in 
the Reichstag. The same diversity shows itself in the 
way in which every German State strives toward char- 
acteristic self-expression. In America, Kansas and Ne- 
braska, and even Nevada and Montana are ultimately 
trying to be like New York and Pennsylvania; but 
Bavaria or Wurtemberg have not the least desire to 



ii2 THE GERMANY OF TO-DAY 

imitate Saxony or Prussia. Germany has no London 
and no Paris. However Berlin may grow, Munich 
and Hamburg, Cologne and Frankfort, and Leipzig and 
the rest will remain centers for important functions 
of German life. A real centralization would too seri- 
ously thwart the wish that everyone contribute his 
best in his own fashion. Accordingly the social life 
offers a greater manifoldness of personalities than 
American life would ever tolerate. The American 
feels that he is in society, that he plays a role, and that 
he is acknowledged as equal if he is not conspicuous and 
is behaving exactly like his set. The German, on the 
other hand, would feel that he was acknowledged as a 
full-fledged member of his set only if he had a partic- 
ular feature to offer by which he was different from the 
others. This, it must be confessed, favors the outcrop 
of those who seek eccentricity in unimportant features 
down to the level of the cranks, but certainly it creates 
the most favorable conditions for the development of 
original minds, of individual talents and spiritual leader- 
ship. In America every month sees the appearance 
of new magazines because the old ones are so success- 
ful and the new ones want to imitate them : in Germany, 
too, every month sees the appearance of new magazines, 
but only because the editors of the new ones are con- 
vinced that all the old ones have been unsuccessful and 
they want to create something different. In every field 



THE GERMANY OF TO-DAY 113 

likeness to others means to the German a lack of indi- 
viduality which destroys the right to exist. 

We have recognized that this movement finds its 
counter-movement. The faithful belief in the inde- 
pendent value of the whole as a whole, without refer- 
ence to the different individuals, necessarily creates the 
longing for a solid organization. In the field of pol- 
itics this carries with it an enthusiastic devotion to every- 
thing which symbolizes the community as a whole. 
This is the real foundation of German monarchy. The 
nation as a totality is, from this German standpoint, 
not sufficiently expressed by the results of popular elec- 
tions. They represent the struggles of individuals 
against individuals. But the symbol of the totality 
must be exempt from the opinions of individuals; it 
must lie beyond parties and conflicts; it must be inher- 
ited and thus given without reference to personal likes 
and dislikes. Here, too, elements of weakness natu- 
rally creep in; above all, the reliance on the inherited 
monarchy with its responsible cabinet government pro- 
duces a regrettable political indifference on the part of 
the average German. To be sure, the Socialists, who 
fight for a new order of things, are eagerly on the bat- 
tle-field, and the Centrists are stirred up to a good fight 
by the Catholic Church, and certain smaller groups are 
politically wide awake because they fight for economic 
interests. But the political party life as such suffers 



ii4 THE GERMANY OF TO-DAY 

from a widespread indolence. The typical German 
citizen without political ambitions does not take any 
trouble in state affairs because he feels vaguely that 
the government will take care that the interests of the 
community are protected. But in our time the mere 
confidence in the monarch and his government cannot 
alone secure the welfare of the community. In the 
complexity of modern life, with its gigantic technical 
achievements, the whole can never come to its own 
without a powerful organization. This belief in the 
efficiency of organization in the interest of the whole as 
a whole has become stronger and stronger in modern 
Germany. It has transformed the commercial life, it 
has molded the social movements, and it has finally be- 
gun to change the attitude of the individuals toward 
society. Public opinion, which is such an efficient or- 
ganization of individual minds, has after all taken hold 
of the most modern lffe in Germany, and all its tech- 
nical means such as the sensational newspaper and the 
muck-raking magazine have come to powerful existence. 
Even the fashion in the small and the large things has 
gained an importance which it never had before in Ger- 
man lands. The individual character feels himself 
threatened by the uniformizing tendency toward relent- 
less organization. 

Here we really have a conflict. The old German 
desire for individual diversity and the new belief in or- 



THE GERMANY OF TO-DAY 115 

ganization with its resulting uniformity of mind are 
two tendencies which cannot be completely harmonized. 
This antagonism of inner forces is the real problem 
which is at the bottom of all unrest among the Germans 
to-day. 



THE GERMAN WOMAN 



This essay first appeared in the Atlantic Monthly 



THE GERMAN WOMAN 

SUMMER before last on one of the first days after 
I had arrived in Berlin I took part in a large 
meeting devoted to the discussion of some problems of 
student life. A committee of leading professors had 
made a motion and some of the most influential men of 
Berlin spoke warmly in its favor. Then a young woman 
stood up and opposed it. She spoke quietly but firmly. 
There was strong objection to her arguments; eloquent 
speakers fought in favor of the original motion. But 
the young woman almost alone held her own and soon 
gained ground. When it finally came to a vote, the 
majority followed the banner of the young leader of 
the opposition. There were only a very few women 
in the whole assembly : it was distinctly the influence of 
woman's oratory over a large group of important men. 
Twenty years ago that would have been entirely impos- 
sible in Germany. A young woman would never have 
dared to take the lead in such a momentous debate, and 
if she had ventured to oppose acknowledged leaders, 
her mere effort would have been resented and this re- 
sentment would have swelled the other party. I felt 

»9 



120 THE GERMAN WOMAN 

that a new time for the influence of German women in 
public life had come. A few weeks later I had to make 
a large number of appointments of secretaries, libra- 
rians and so on for the new Amerika-Institut of the Ger- 
man government. To all with whom I consulted it 
seemed from the start the most natural that I should 
appoint women, and accordingly I saw in my office 
scores of candidates who applied for the various posi- 
tions. This gave me ample opportunity to become ac- 
quainted with the social standing of those young women 
who nowadays seek employment in Germany, and every 
hour reenforced my surprise at the greatness of the 
change. Most of them came from families who twenty 
years ago would have considered it impossible for their 
daughters to accept any paid positions or to seek an in- 
dependent life activity. At about the same season I 
began my university lectures as Harvard Exchange 
Professor, and when I saw more than a hundred women 
students scattered among the men, in my lecture room, 
I could not help thinking of my student days when one 
solitary American woman was the spectacle and the sen- 
sation in the lecture courses which I attended in Leipzig. 
This revolution of affairs is most remarkable, and yet 
to everyone the new order seems a matter of course. 
Soon afterward I was present at a great banquet at 
the seventieth birthday of a leading jurist. The best 
known professors of law made speeches and the cele- 



THE GERMAN WOMAN 121 

brated guest of honor told in enthusiastic words how he 
had devoted his life to the idea that one nation ought 
to have one law. Then a young woman arose with a 
champagne glass in her hand. She brilliantly chose to 
interpret the words of the speaker to mean that the 
nation ought indeed to have one law only, that is, the 
same law for men and women, and that the women 
must therefore have the same rights as the men in public 
life. In all my life in the fatherland I had never be- 
fore heard a woman making a toast at a public dinner. 
A few weeks later I myself spoke in the leading woman's 
club in Berlin. Who would have thought of women's 
clubs in Germany twenty years ago! That night 
everything looked exactly like a club in New York or 
Boston. The whole attitude of the audience, the in- 
troduction, the questions after the lecture, the refresh- 
ments, the whole make-up, everything, reminded me of 
well-known sights, and I should have believed myself 
to be in a real American woman's clubhouse, if the 
president had not finally led me to a beautiful little par- 
lor over the entrance of which the sign said " smoking 
room." It was a room of cozy lounging places for the 
young ladies when they enjoy their cigarettes. I could 
not get rid of the question: where is my Germany of 
yesterday? 

There cannot be any doubt that America and the 
[American woman have a large share in these changes 



122 THE GERMAN WOMAN 

of German public opinion. Of course such movements 
cannot come from without; mere imitation would be in- 
effective in questions which touch so deeply the inmost 
problems of the nation. The social organic conditions 
must be given in the inner life of the country, and it is 
not difficult to recognize the factors in Germany which 
necessarily led toward this change in woman's life. 
Nevertheless the far-reaching emancipation of women 
in American life and her important participation in the 
public functions of society have given a remarkable im- 
pulse to the German movement. The reasons why the 
American nation came so much earlier to an anticon- 
servative view of women's rights are evident. The 
American view of life since the puritan days has been 
individualistic : the aim of society is the development of 
the individual. It is true that puritanism in itself did 
not favor the participation of women in public tasks, 
but this individualistic spirit of puritanism and of all 
American life philosophy necessarily forced American 
society to the acknowledgment of equal rights for 
women and men as personalities. The German view 
has been that the individual lives for the social good; 
the claims of the personality must therefore be subor- 
dinated to the claims of the community, and this devo- 
tion must begin in the smallest community, the fam- 
ily. Man and woman must live not for their own sake 
but for their family's sake. Hence the individual 



THE GERMAN WOMAN 123 

wishes of the woman must be subordinated to her func- 
tions as member of the family. 

But no less important than such a general philosophy 
of life was the difference in the practical conditions of 
the two countries. America was a pioneer land which 
had to be opened in a physical and in a social sense. 
This absorbed the energies of the men. Commercial, 
legal and political life took hold of the male population 
so completely that the higher cultural interests had to 
go over into the care of women, and that secured to 
them an independence which was not seldom cultural 
superiority. Furthermore America has still to-day one 
and a half million more men than women, while Ger- 
many has a million more women than men. This tra- 
ditional scarcity of women necessarily created an over- 
estimation and a readiness to allow women an exalted 
place. Many other elements of American life have 
worked in the same direction. America became in the 
last century the most progressive country on earth in 
the question of women's rights. Slowly — in the eyes 
of many Germans and in the eyes of almost all Amer- 
icans far too slowly — Germany has followed. But 
here, as in many other movements, it has proved that 
though Germany is very reluctant to enter a new path, 
as soon as it has entered it rushes forward on it with 
unexpected speed and energy. Certainly much still re- 
mains to be done, and he who listens to the radical 



124 THE GERMAN WOMAN 

speeches of certain revolutionary reformers would 
fancy that the greatest part is still before us. But 
every sober spectator is bound to acknowledge that the 
change is simply astonishing, even if he does not sym- 
pathize with every feature of it. Yet we ought not to 
forget that while it is something new for recent Ger- 
many, it is not at all new for the Germans as historic 
people. The Germans of mediaeval times were in the 
same situation in which the Americans were in their 
pioneer days. The men's hard work absorbed their 
energies so completely that every cultural interest, es- 
pecially education and learning, was left to the church 
and the women. They were the refined element as 
against the barbaric men, and their superiority was 
acknowledged and sung. To learn from books was 
considered unmanly, and only after the renaissance be- 
gan the time when the new scholarship became men's 
work. In the sixteenth century the German woman 
was decidedly considered the equal of man; in the 
seventeenth century man alone enjoyed the higher edu- 
cation and this scholarly education then became more 
and more the condition of professional life. The po- 
sition of women steadily sunk, just through the inferior- 
ity of her education. It needed the concerted action 
at the end of the nineteenth century to bring again a 
fundamental change in the social possibilities of German 
women. 



THE GERMAN WOMAN 125 

But it would be entirely misleading to fancy that this 
new German movement has a unified character. In 
reality it is a large number of movements which to a 
certain degree even interfere with one another and 
which have very different tendencies. Common to all 
of them is only the desire to improve the position of the 
female members of the social organism. The most 
conspicuous efforts of the women of the last decade 
were those which tried to secure open paths for the 
woman of unusual gifts. Such a movement was neces- 
sarily most visible because it dealt with a prominent 
few and not with the colorless masses. It was so easy 
to point out the injustice and the harm done to the 
community, if the genius of a talented woman had no 
chance for the highest development of its inborn en- 
ergies. A woman with unusual talent, perhaps for 
scholarship in a special field, had to remain intellectually 
sterile because the highest schools were closed to her 
and the universities forbidden. The scientific life of 
the whole nation had to lose from such a narrow 
policy. This was the argument which appealed most 
easily to the German mind, and steadily the hindrances 
were removed. There is to-day no longer any reason 
whatever why any woman of unusual gifts should not 
enter into full competition with any man and should 
not reach the highest point of which her powers are 
capable. Public opinion even favors her work. And 



123 THE GERMAN WOMAN 

yet it can hardly be said that this particular movement 
which refers to the cultural aristocracy of women has 
brought any important change. We see efforts upon 
efforts, but the total outcome is after all disappointing. 
The German experience demonstrates again what the 
experiences of more radical countries have shown be- 
fore, that the creative work of women is fair and may 
represent highly estimable qualities and values, and cer- 
tainly does not stand below the average of men's, but 
nowhere reaches the highest mark. Just as in Amer- 
ica, in Germany too no woman has as yet attained a 
scholarly achievement of striking character, still less of 
true greatness. We must not forget that fields like 
literature and painting and music have always stood 
open to women and that there the same limitations have 
been observable. Germany has some splendid women 
painters and some delightful authoresses, but no one 
feels impelled to connect with their names the hopes 
for a new great upward movement. There is no one 
among them whom the Germans would compare with 
Arnold Bocklin the artist, with Gerhart Hauptmann the 
poet, or with Richard Strauss the musician. All that 
the women have given here as in America are some best 
sellers in fiction and their like in painting and scholar- 
ship. 

The movement in favor of the exceptional woman 
is thus after all the least important and the least char- 



THE GERMAN WOMAN 127 

acteristic. What has truly social significance and 
marks the change in the beginning of the twentieth 
century are those reforms which concern the millions, 
but here we have the greatest diversity of needs. To 
distinguish the chief directions we may acknowledge the 
following needs which had to be satisfied. The aver- 
age woman of to-day, rich or poor, feels a longing for a 
serious interest and a significant content for her exist- 
ence. The reform aimed to overcome the emptiness 
of woman's life. Second, millions of women have to 
earn their living. Their opportunities had been too 
limited and too little adjusted to modern society and to 
the technique of modern existence. The reform aimed 
to secure a decent livelihood for the unsupported 
woman. Quite different circles are touched by a third 
effort. The women of the lower classes found their 
time and energies absorbed by hard work which kept 
them away from the house and encroached upon their 
home life. For them a disburdening had to be sought 
in order again to give them an opportunity for digni- 
fied family life. The reform aimed to overcome the 
antidomestic effect of woman's labor. Fourthly, the 
married life meant subordination of the German 
woman. The reform aimed to secure equality between 
husband and wife. Fifthly, the average German 
woman was confined to domestic influence. She had 
no chance to become a power in the community. The 



128 THE GERMAN WOMAN 

reform aimed to secure for her full influence in public 
life. There are many other partial tendencies in that 
great forward movement of recent years, but even the 
few which we have pointed out show with sufficient 
clearness the antagonism involved: the emptiness of the 
life of the upper classes demanded a change which 
would take the woman away from the home and the 
overburdening of the lower classes demanded a change 
which would bring the woman back to the home. Yet 
we can feel instinctively that there is a certain inner re- 
lation between all these movements and that it is no 
chance that they came into the foreground at the same 
time. 

We spoke first of the emptiness of woman's life. It 
has often been pointed out how this was a necessary 
result of the great changes in the technical conditions 
of modern civilization. Domestic activity could really 
fill a busy woman's time in the past; it can no longer do 
so since weaving and knitting and baking and a hundred 
other good works of the German housewife of the past 
have long been taken out of the German woman's 
hands. Factory methods control the life of our time. 
Even the rearing of children has been simplified for the 
German mother through the modern division of work: 
her energies lack fit objects. Far from any question 
of money earning, the desire for a useful, regulated, 
systematic life activity was the necessary result of these 



THE GERMAN WOMAN 129] 

changed conditions. Of course the talents and inclina- 
tions show every possible variation and any single pre- 
scription would not have been sufficient to satisfy this 
imillionfold need. But it was increasingly clear that 
more than superficial dilettantism was needed, that a 
more thorough achievement was sought than the tra- 
ditional playing of the piano or reading of French 
novels. The essential basis for a new arrangement of 
woman's life was an improved education. The girls' 
school of Germany in the rather recent past stood in- 
comparably below the boys' school. It was, measured 
by German standards, superficial and leading nowhere. 
The school career of a well-educated girl was completed 
at sixteen years, while her brothers went on with their 
much sharper work to the nineteenth year in school, 
then to go over into the university. All which led be- 
yond the typical girls' school had a professional, normal 
school character. This has been fundamentally 
changed by the new institutions which the laws of a few 
years ago have established. The old schools have been 
greatly improved and above all they have been sup- 
plemented by a complex system of upper grade schools 
through which any possible goal of an intelligent girl 
can be reached. She may go on to the same examina- 
tion which the boys have to pass in order to enter the 
university, or she may seek a higher humanistic educa- 
tion without any university end in view, or she may 



130 THE GERMAN WOMAN 

enter higher schools for special professional prepara- 
tion: in short, she can secure in regular channels with- 
out any difficulties and without finding any prejudices 
an independent serious life work and may develop her 
personality and prepare herself for her role in the com- 
munity as well as in a refined and stimulating home. 
Anyone who examines carefully those new regulations 
must acknowledge that they are almost radical and that 
the German governments after a too long period of 
neglect, under the influence of the new demands have 
gone almost to an extreme, offering especially in the 
so-called " lyceum " schools a more complex thoroughly 
modern course than the energies of young women are 
likely to be able to carry through. Certainly their 
chances are now not inferior to those of boys, and yet 
in a careful deliberate way the whole work is adjusted 
to the special interests and special spheres of woman- 
hood. 

Public opinion has completely adjusted itself to this 
new order. In every family — an the large cities es- 
pecially, but slowly the change has entered the small 
towns too — it seems beyond discussion that the daugh- 
ter prepare for a definite line of activity. The girl who 
does a little embroidery and otherwise waits for the 
fiance to come is dying out. The German experience 
seems to confirm the American one that under this new 
rule the fiance may come a little later but not less cer- 



THE GERMAN WOMAN 131 

tainly. It is true that many a girl with a serious life 
interest now refuses a husband whom her mother at her 
time would have accepted because she would have 
dreaded the emptiness of an unmarried life, but just on 
this account the marriage which she finally prefers is on 
a higher level. 

Of course the problem of life interest cannot be sep- 
arated from the question of life support. The girl of 
the well-to-do house who pursues university courses or 
devotes herself to the activities of the social worker 
may follow certain lines of interest which would never 
yield an earning sufficient to pay for her gloves. But 
on the whole even those women who are well supported 
are encouraged in their serious devotion to earnest 
work by the side thought that in possible days of need 
their training may make them independent. For by 
far the larger part of the population the practical side 
of the question stands in the foreground from the start. 
Two economic conditions force this on Germany much 
more than on America. The great difference in the 
number of the male and female population, giving to 
the adult women a lead of a million make it necessary 
that there remain by far more women unmarried in Ger- 
many than in the United States, the more as a tenth 
of the adult men prefer to remain bachelors. Most of 
these unmarried women are obliged to seek their live- 
lihood. On the other hand the wages of the laboring 



132 THE GERMAN WOMAN 

classes are low and make it in a higher degree than in 
America necessary that wives and daughters contribute 
by their labor to the earnings of the family. Hence the 
number of female breadwinners in Germany is exceed- 
ingly large. 

In America not more than 14.3% of the whole fe- 
male population is engaged in gainful occupations as 
against 61.3% of the male. Moreover even this 
14.3% becomes still much smaller when only the native 
white of native parentage are considered, as the aver- 
age for the whole country results from the extremely 
strong participation of the negro women. In Germany 
the percentage of working men is the same as in Amer- 
ica, 61.1%, but the percentage of working women is 
30.4%. Almost ten million women are breadwinners 
in Germany. There are 3.5 millions of women en- 
gaged in industrial work and business as against 10.8 
million men, and especially characteristic of the German 
situation seems the figure that 738,000 women are in- 
dependent owners and heads of establishments. 1.3 
millions are laborers in factories. In the textile indus- 
tries for instance the women are in the majority, 
400,000 women as against 371,000 men. In the cloth- 
ing industry 228,000 women stand against 97,000 men. 

If the intensity of the woman movement were to be 
measured simply by the amount of participation of 
women in the work of the nation, the German women 



THE GERMAN WOMAN 133 

would have had for a long while no reason whatever 
for complaint. It could always have been shown to 
them that even in America the women had a much 
smaller part in the labor. But the true progress of 
woman's rights demands of course a very different 
standard. The aim must be to disburden woman from 
the labor which injures her home life, and on the other 
side to open for her the fields of higher activity. In 
both respects the last years have shown a decided im- 
provement, and all the more characteristic efforts of 
systematic reform are concentrated on these points. 
The higher professions like those of the physician, of 
the high school teacher, and similar engagements which 
in Germany demand four years and more of graduate 
university work are now open to women under the same 
conditions as to men. The number of women students 
at the university this year is about twenty-four hun- 
dred. But in a way, still more important is the great 
variety of occupations fit and favorable for women 
which do not demand university graduate work and 
which have been conquered by women in recent years. 
All German states nowadays allow the appointment of 
female factory inspectors and industrial inspectors, a 
calling in which on account of the great number of fe- 
male workers women can be most beneficially at work. 
A much favored career for women is also that of the 
librarian, which only a few years ago was still unknown 



134 THE GERMAN WOMAN 

as an occupation tor women, while to-day in Berlin alone 
two large librarian schools supply Germany with more 

t f 5 m 9 ^ ' ' n T'O t • c -i c - "- n n t-r a »-« •> - '-> } '■ - 1 • <u > *■ o »• • - c « .- — n->cc'^V 
icu.dit i-nJi «-. ,.ij w.^-~,_. Lii\» w^: v -.__-... >»5 ti.. P'Ji; . 

use. The important service as professional nurse with 
l:~Z systematic training in the hospitals has become an- 
other much sought function for the daughters of edu- 
cated families. Literary and artistic work, especially 
arts and cra r t^. hl^h cla^ 5 ^a^de^'"*? a~" -c^-y jo~~-~. 

management of bureaus for typewriting and translating 
and a hundred similar half-professional activities for 
intelligent and energetic young women are eagerly 
sought to-day. 

How far this new type of female breadwinners is 
successful or net. it may be too early to judge. Public 
opinion is still somewhat undecided. In former times 
when the better educated women in cases of need had 
pra^^-x^y no otnei resources u.an wu.^ng as ciemen- 
tary teachers in girls' schorls or as pianc teachers, as 
housekeepers or as governesses, or in small business 
enterprises, there was no criticism and no doubt as to 
their ntness. They undertook the characteristically fe- 
male work in the community and no competition with 
men stirred up the discussion. Now it is dlnerent. 
Almost all the new callings have been taken away from 
men. and in this economic struggle of the sexes the 
characteristic qualities have come to sharper expres- 



THE GERMAN WOMAN 135 

sion. Deciding qualities there are, of course, not 
only the personal ones but also the social, especially 
the woman's freedom from financial obligation for the 
support of a family. Woman is therefore every- 
where able to underbid man. The dangerous conse- 
quences which have resulted from this social condition 
in the United States in the teachers' profession, where 
teaching has entirely gone over into the hands of the 
women as lowest bidders, have not shown themselves 
in the school situation of Germany. This is made im- 
possible by the fact that with the exception of the rural 
primary schools there is hardly any coeducation in Ger- 
many, and Germany stands out against women teachers 
in the boys' schools, while it at the same time insists on 
a strong participation of male teachers in girls' schools. 
All this is settled by state law and the mere underbid- 
ding of salaries can have no influence on this general 
principle. But in every other field the competition is 
strongly felt. The girl who lives in the house of her 
parents and wants to earn only a little spending money 
and moreover expects to get married, may easily do the 
secretarial or library or artistic work for a salary which 
a man would feel to be inadequate. As far as the 
character of the work itself is concerned it is only nat- 
ural that there should be widespread complaint about 
a certain lack of physical strength which brings quick 
fatigue and too frequent interruptions by little ailments 



136 THE GERMAN WOMAN 

in times of hard work. But it is more surprising that 
complaint is so often heard about carelessness, lack of 
accuracy and thoroughness, even of disorderliness, the 
same type of objections which the university professors 
make as to the female students in the laboratories and 
hospitals. 

There is no doubt that the practical success has not 
been complete and the outcome has been even to many 
friends of the woman movement a distinct disappoint- 
ment. Some claim that this is necessary, that in a land 
which makes such high demands on the accuracy and 
thoroughness of man, woman will never be perfectly an 
equal, and that a reaction against the present onrush 
of women toward the higher callings will soon set in. 
Others insist that the period of readjustment has so far 
been too short, that too little experience existed for 
every woman to find the really fitting place and that 
all the complaint will disappear as soon as a still much 
larger expansion of her professional activity has been 
developed. Certainly one antiprofessional feature can- 
not and ought not to be removed. Just this type of 
active intelligent women who create an important life 
work are marrying like others: they marry late but 
finally their marriage too closes their career. The 
number of female physicians who are really practicing 
in Germany is very small compared with the number of 
those who are prepared for it. The others have gen- 



THE GERMAN WOMAN 137 

erally married and have given up their medical ambi- 
tion. It cannot be doubted that this interferes greatly 
with the enthusiasm of the teachers who are to prepare 
women for a higher calling, and similarly the whole 
country cannot fully overcome the feeling that there is a 
lack of seriousness, almost an element of play and of dil- 
ettantism in the work because neither the women them- 
selves nor the spectators really believe that it will be 
their calling to their life's end. But it would be unfair 
to deny that there is also no lack of praise for the posi- 
tive qualities of the woman's contribution to the nation's 
higher tasks. All agree that the women are industri- 
ous and eager, that they bring an element of freshness, 
humanity and moral inspiration into the business of the 
day and that they do their work with patience and dis- 
cretion and serenity. The chief success which is be- 
yond dispute is that they have eliminated the prejudices 
of their parents' time. Even those who are skeptical 
as to the objective results have long ago given up re- 
peating the old-fashioned arguments that the daughter 
of an educated family ought to confine herself to the 
sphere of the home. 

This however does not touch that circle of thoughts 
which appear to some as prejudice too, but which has 
a right to demand more consideration: is this public life 
work in harmony with the functions of woman as a wife 
and mother? Again it may be said that Germany has 



i 3 8 THE GERMAN WOMAN 

not come to inner clearness on this point. Many Ger- 
man physicians argue seriously that the strenuous oc- 
cupation makes too many tender girls unfit or less fit 
for later motherhood. Her physical energies are ex- 
hausted and she enters into married life less strong. 
Sympathizers reply that the burdens of the old-fashioned 
housewife and house-daughter were often more exact- 
ing and exhausting than any position as librarian or sec- 
retary. Moreover they insist that the discipline and the 
intellectual training which the well-educated breadwin- 
ner gains through her calling is a perfect training for 
her true duties as wife and mother and that as prepa- 
ration it is far superior to the idleness to which nowa- 
days most girls of that social standing would be con- 
demned. 

It is evident that almost no one of these arguments 
holds for the work of the lower classes. In a certain 
degree the situation is almost the reverse. The physi- 
cal injury to the organism by the constant exhausting 
labor, the lack of free time for any inner development 
and even for the cultivation of her home activities, 
the paralyzing monotony of her factory work: all is 
surely antagonistic to the desirable status of individual 
and family life. Here therefore the reform has taken 
the opposite character. The aim has been, not to ex- 
pand the woman's work but to reduce it and to protect 
the working woman against injurious demands. This 



THE GERMAN WOMAN 139 

element of the woman movement was at first somewhat 
in the background or rather it was at first left to the 
Social-Democratic political party. The real so-called 
woman movement in Germany started with refined 
women who were more touched by the inner misery of 
empty lives of women in their own layer of society 
than by the suffering of the lower classes of which they 
knew little and which seemed to them more or less in- 
evitable. The cries for help in these lower social re- 
gions naturally appealed more to those who were not in- 
terested in the position of woman and man but in the 
position of poor and rich. The socialistic warcry in 
the interest of the women workers was therefore 
"Down with capital!" The tremendous growth of 
Social Democracy in political Germany was to a high 
degree due to its effective and sincere fight for the la- 
boring woman. But in the meantime the social con- 
science of all Germany has been stirred up, sympathy 
for the laboring population has led to those unparalleled 
efforts of state insurance and factory legislation by 
which the women have profited as much as the men. 
At the same time the trade unions have grown rapidly 
and are dominating industrial life as perhaps nowhere 
else; and here again the women have their full share. 
More and more has the non-socialistic public move- 
ment in the interest of women turned to this field and 
through the efforts of brilliant women leaders recent 



i 4 o THE GERMAN WOMAN 

years have witnessed reforms of really organic char- 
acter. It has become increasingly clear that the char- 
acteristic difficulties of women at work are untouched 
by the problem of socialism. It has been felt that the 
real difficulty was lying in the fundamental fact that 
through the changes in the modern home life and tech- 
nique woman has been forced into an industrial life 
which has been shaped in adjustment to the energies of 
men. This has involved a misuse of the female or- 
ganism and the great demand of the women reformers 
to-day is for a better adjustment between woman and 
work. Under their influence the reforming tendencies 
have turned no less to those who were entirely helpless 
because they were entirely scattered, the servant girls, 
the waitresses, even the agricultural workers and on a 
higher level the business employes. Organized asso- 
ciations have been formed for all of them, with and 
without political or religious background, and almost 
all of them aim toward social and cultural improve- 
ments as well as toward the strictly economic and legal 
ones. 

The progress of women in that conquest of the pro- 
fessions and in the improvement of legislation regard- 
ing female work can be proved by figures and 
illustrations, but much of the best which these move- 
ments have brought to modern Germany cannot be 
demonstrated or measured and does not show on the 



THE GERMAN WOMAN 141 

surface at all. Yet the careful observer who knew 
the Germany of a quarter of a century ago and who 
now comes in contact with a great variety of homes 
must notice a thorough change which for the national 
life is perhaps more important than any question of 
woman study and of woman labor. The essential 
point is that the position of woman in the structure of 
the family has become more dignified by the develop- 
ment of a stronger sense of comradeship between hus- 
band and wife. The German family life has always 
been healthy and sound: in the home has always lain 
the strength of the community. There has never been 
lack of love in the typical German house, but all the 
feelings of affection went together with a sincere be- 
lief in inequality. The woman did not feel that as un- 
fair or unjust, inasmuch as it had been a German tra- 
dition since the seventeenth century that the wife in all 
intellectual and non-domestic questions naturally should 
subordinate herself to her master. She was accus- 
tomed to be guided, and while of course her personality 
gave warmth and meaning to the home, she herself felt 
it as her ideal duty to devote her energies to the build- 
ing up of a home which received its stamp from the 
husband. This attitude has passed. The better edu- 
cation of the women, their greater importance in public 
life, the disappearance of the old-fashioned prejudices, 
the greater leisure of present-day women for intellec- 



1 42 THE GERMAN WOMAN 

tual interests and the constant airing of women prob- 
lems have quietly worked together to convince men that 
the place of woman in the home is a place of equality 
and that true comradeship can intertwine with real love. 
The frequent commanding tone in which the cheaper 
kind of men so long indulged in their intercourse with 
their wives would to-day be considered simply as rude- 
ness and would not be tolerated by anyone. Nor would 
the right kind of woman, however ready she would be 
in her love to make the greatest sacrifice for her hus- 
band, any longer think of that self-effacement which to 
previous generations so often appeared as woman's 
natural share. The German woman of to-day would 
not be afraid of the hardship in it, but she would shrink 
from the indignity. This new group of ideas does not 
begin to work on the wedding day. It determines no 
less the choice of the companion for life. The ideal 
of the young man is no longer the girl without thoughts 
of her own. Certainly the immature marriages at a 
very early age seem to decrease. To-day the age of 
the girl at which the greatest number of marriages oc- 
cur is twenty-three. Only 25,000 girls marry at the 
age of nineteen or twenty, 39,000 at the age of twenty 
to twenty-one, 52,000 at twenty-one to twenty-two, 
55,000 at twenty-two to twenty-three, 53,000 at 
twenty-three to twenty-four and 47,000 at twenty-four 
to twenty-five. For men the maximum of marriages 



THE GERMAN WOMAN 143 

occurs at the age of twenty-six. Of course Germany 
too shows one effect of the new order of things which 
seems necessarily to belong to such a more liberal view 
of woman's position, the increase of divorces. In the 
years 1903 to 1907 the average among 100,000 inhabi- 
tants was still only 18.8 divorces, in 1908 it had al- 
ready grown to 21.2, and the statistics show clearly 
that the figures are lowest in the least developed parts 
of Germany, in the eastern provinces in which the old 
order of ideas prevails, and highest in the most pro- 
gressive parts, especially in the large cities. In Berlin 
there are 87 divorces among 100,000 inhabitants, in 
Hamburg 76. One other figure may raise still more 
doubt as to the degree of happiness which the change 
has brought to womanhood. The increase of divorces 
may still be interpreted as not meaning subjective un- 
happiness. On the contrary it may indicate that in 
earlier times women had to suffer lifelong misery in 
marriages which they are now more ready to give up 
in order to gain their freedom. But there cannot be 
two interpretations of the other figure which indicates 
that the number of female suicides has also relatively 
increased. And it is characteristic that this increase 
is not only a participation in the general tendency to 
suicide which may be the result of the more complicated 
conditions of present-day life, but the number of fe- 
male suicides in relation to the male suicides has grown, 



144 THE GERMAN WOMAN 

too. The percentage of female suicides in relation to 
male suicides has grown in the last ten years from 26% 
to 29%. But there is no progress without its cruel- 
ties. The new freedom and the new responsibility will 
demand their victims and will unbalance many a weak 
personality, but they will grow steadily and beneficially. 
The movement to equal rights and to emancipation 
from mere obedience was from the beginning not lim- 
ited to the circle of the home. The new influence was 
more modestly and yet persistently exerted in public 
life. The demand for equal suffrage, to be sure, has 
remained entirely in the background. Those elements 
which give to the suffrage movement in America its 
greatest strength, the desire for the purification of poli- 
tics and for the elimination of corruption and graft, 
and on the other hand the need of women in the legis- 
lature in order to secure industrial legislation favorable 
to women, are both inapplicable and negligible for the 
German situation. The women themselves feel that 
their suffrage would simply duplicate the number of 
votes, without changing anything in the character of 
the parties or of the legislature. But all the more are 
the reformers eager to secure for the women an influ- 
ential share in public functions, for instance in munici-" 
pal offices, in the school's administration, in the public 
care for the poor, in the inspection of factories and 
domiciles, in police positions and many similar activi- 



THE GERMAN WOMAN 145 

ties. The number of such positions is growing from 
year to year with the enlarged supply of well-trained 
women. Correspondingly the women with steady per- 
sistence fight for their representation in chambers of 
commerce, chambers of agriculture, chambers of in- 
dustry and so on. The advance here is extremely slow 
and while the woman who owns a business has a right 
to have her firm represented in the elections for the 
chambers of commerce, she herself cannot be elected. 
The German women who seek advance in any public 
lines know well that there cannot be rights without 
duties. They know that the real demand of the hour 
for the progressive woman is the study of social prob- 
lems and an earnest training in social activities. Ex- 
cellent schools for the social education of women have 
been established and a corps of well-trained helpers 
and reformers is growing up to-day and will do more 
for the spreading of progressive ideas than the mere 
declamations of the radical orators, whose time has on 
the whole passed away in the woman movement of Ger- 
many. 



COEDUCATION 



This essay first appeared in the Ladies Home Journal 



COEDUCATION 

WHEN the scientific work of women in the uni- 
versities is under discussion, I am quite proud of 
my noble record on the side of the coeducationalists. 
When I opened my psychological laboratory in the Ger- 
man university of Freiburg twenty-five years ago, I 
was the first there who had women among the men in 
higher research, and from that year to the present day, 
at first in Germany and now for many years in Amer- 
ica, I have not conducted my laboratory for a single 
day without having some feminine psychologists in con- 
stant cooperation with masculine doctor candidates. 
And if I recall the long line of women who took their 
psychological doctor's degree after years of such co- 
educational studies under my charge, I hardly think 
they can be equaled. There were Mary Whiton 
Calkins, whose psychological contributions have made 
a decided impression on the development of psychol- 
ogy, Ethel Puffer, whose " Psychology of Beauty " 
stands foremost in American aesthetics, Eleanor Row- 
land, whose " Right to Believe " is a little masterpiece 
of philosophical discussion, and many others. I hope 

H9 



150 COEDUCATION 

many still will follow and every one will be most wel- 
come in our company of men scholars. Nevertheless I 
profess my belief that the high schools and above all 
the colleges ought not to be coeducational, and that co- 
education ought not to begin below the level of gradu- 
ate work. 

Those who want to exclude women from the men's 
colleges at once fall under the suspicion of trying 
to hold down the girls of the land to an inferior level 
and of wanting to exclude them from the benefits 
of highest education. In reality, as matters stand to- 
day, the problem of coeducation in college ought to 
be discussed entirely without reference to the right of 
women to highest intellectual culture. Thirty years 
ago the matter stood otherwise. If women wanted 
scholarly education, the straightest way to the goal 
seemed to be to admit them to the institutions of men. 
To-day there is no need of defending the claims of 
women; the women themselves have declared with 
pride that the battle is now won. We no longer hear 
the old-fashioned pitiful arguments that the women 
have too small a brain for study, or that their health 
breaks down if they go through a college course, or 
that they lose charm and become unwomanly if their 
education goes beyond the finishing school, or that they 
are bad housekeepers and selfish mothers if they have 
too much intellectual training. All these exaggera- 



COEDUCATION 151 

tions which belonged to a period of transition have 
melted away. The social prejudices have disappeared 
and anyone who should argue to-day against the prin- 
ciple of college education for women would appear a 
relic of by-gone times. 

But just because this question of the day before yes- 
terday can be eliminated to-day, we ought to be with- 
out prejudice in discussing the entirely different ques- 
tion of whether in the period from the fourteenth to 
the twenty-second year the education of boys and girls 
in the same classroom is desirable or not. The prob- 
lem is usually recognized as that of coeducation ver- 
sus segregation. But this latter term too easily sug- 
gests from the start that an injustice is done and that 
separation is effected where naturally unity ought to 
prevail. It emphasizes merely the negative side and 
does not indicate at all that an independent education 
of the girls and boys can have a positive purpose and 
a positive advantage. We ought rather to suggest by 
our terms that that for which we are pleading is a 
special education for men and a special education for 
women adapted to their particular needs. From this 
point of view I should prefer to label this discussion 
bieducation versus coeducation. It indicates the de- 
mand for two independent types of education. The 
word is formed like bimetallism, but what it expresses 
is far better than the bimetallistic claim. 



i 5 2 COEDUCATION 

We believers in bieducation would not for a mo- 
ment think of closing our research work, our labora- 
tories and our most advanced institutions of the gradu- 
ate school to any well-prepared women. Nor would 
we have anything to say in favor of separated medical 
schools or law schools or divinity schools or tech- 
nological schools. As soon as professional work be- 
gins, all separation of the sexes would be meaningless 
and undesirable. Much of that work simply cannot be 
doubled, and for most of it duplication would be an in- 
excusable waste. The legal instruction of the fem- 
inine lawyer must be exactly the same as that of the 
man, if she is ever to be a useful member of the bar. 
If any social arguments speak against such professional 
work in common, they are decidedly subordinated to 
the rigid demands of the vocation. But just the es- 
sential point which cannot be emphasized too much is 
that high schools and colleges ought not to be con- 
ceived of as vocational institutions. They are to serve 
the culture of women and men as against the vocational 
training. A demarcation line must be drawn between 
the college on the one side and the professional school 
on the other side, if the highest interests of society are 
to be served, and as soon as this demarcation line is 
recognized, the different methods seem a matter of 
course. The bieducational scheme is the ideal for the 
years of cultural education. 



COEDUCATION 153 

There are too many who in the rush of the market 
have lost the feeling for this essential difference. 
They would like to carry the demands of the earning 
vocation down into college, into high school and into 
the primary school. They fancy that everything which 
is not directly useful for the vocational technique is a 
waste of time and energy. They have stuffed our col- 
leges with practical subjects and have allowed far-reach- 
ing choice of courses in the high schools under the one 
point of view that only that which is directly applicable 
to the future trade can be worth while. If this tend- 
ency were to win the day, the lifework would be built 
up on thinner and thinner foundations of real culture 
and our society would be more and more threatened by 
uneducated experts. The whole cultural level of our 
community would sink, and while the earning power of 
the individuals might not suffer immediately, the value 
of this whole fabric and the worthiness of our social 
life would rapidly diminish. It is most fortunate that 
our time shows a strong and healthy reaction against 
such superficial tendencies. The signs are evident 
which indicate that the belief in a cultural basis is gain- 
ing a stronger hold. The community feels with in- 
creasing earnestness that ultimately the general educa- 
tion counts more than anything for the lifework of the 
nation and that any professional training without such 
a basis is shallow and finally inefficient The women 



154 COEDUCATION 

above all have every interest to stand for this broader 
ideal. The historical development of the nation has 
created a public situation in which the women have be- 
come the real guardians of the national culture. 
While the men had to work as pioneers, had to open 
the land and to organize business and politics, the 
women had to protect the ideal interests. If they too 
were to yield to the shortsighted view which disregards 
culture and would like to transform the school time into 
a mere period of apprenticeship for practical trades, 
the future of the country would be most seriously 
threatened. 

Two possibilities, it seems, lie before us. Either 
this tendency to early professionalism will become vic- 
torious and the colleges and high schools will be more 
and more transformed into places of vocational train- 
ing. Or the reaction against this professionalism will 
win the day and the schools and colleges will be once 
more saved for a real cultural influence, removed from 
the technical work of the vocational schools. No one 
to-day can foresee whether the one or the other possi- 
bility will become realized. The chances are great 
that neither of the two tendencies will be entirely de- 
feated. The one will remain more prevalent in cer- 
tain parts of the country, the other in other parts of 
the country. But this is clear. The consequence with 
regard to coeducation or bieducation ought to be the 



COEDUCATION 155 

same in either of the two cases. In either case it will 
be necessary and desirable in the highest interests of 
future society that the women receive their education 
separated from the men. 

If professionalism wins the day, the college courses 
will become more and more practical; the natural 
science courses will become more and more technical 
and adjusted to the needs of the manufacturer and the 
engineer, the historical and economic courses will be 
more and more shaded for the practical use of the 
lawyer and politician. In short, the lectures of the col- 
lege will lose their cultural value and will be short- 
cuts to the market-places of the world. The fear that 
this may happen is strongly suggested to everyone who 
watches the changes in our public life. We see how 
the most different factors of our social surroundings 
are influenced and tainted by the low, practical, ma- 
terialistic instincts. We see how the press of the 
country has become sensational, how the theaters are 
brought down to the level of farce, and how the social 
struggle gradually becomes adjusted to the selfish de- 
sires. Would it be surprising if the institutions of 
learning also should yield to the pressure of the lower 
instincts and devastate the traditions of ideal culture 
in the interest of schemes for " getting rich quick? " 
Every serious citizen will hope that this time may not 
come but where it shows its symptoms, there indeed 



i S 6 COEDUCATION 

one consequence must be absolutely demanded: Keep 
the future wives and mothers and teachers away from 
such breeding places of uneducated professionalism. 
The more the man's college becomes practical, the more 
the woman's college must be segregated from it. The 
woman can remain the guardian of American culture 
only if her place of education is filled with the spirit 
of an ideal belief in the value of that which is true and 
good and beautiful without reference to its market 
price. Such cultural study as against professional 
study does not mean a smattering knowledge of a hun- 
dred things fit to be talked about over the teacups, nor 
does it mean a superficial polish or a purely literary 
education. Nor does it necessarily mean Greek or 
Latin or fine arts. But it does mean an harmonious de- 
velopment of the human energies, an educated attitude 
toward life with an ability to see the small things small 
and the great things great, to value the ideals of life 
and to be trained in an earnest devotion to truth and 
beauty and morality. 

But let us hope that the other possible development 
may bless the future of our country. Let us hope that 
the spirit of cultural idealism may prevail and that 
school and college may be kept free from the selfish de- 
mands of the trades. Must we not then demand still 
more seriously that the woman's college and the man's 
college go on separate ways? To give to boys and 



COEDUCATION 157 

girls true culture certainly does not mean to give them 
during the years of adolescence the same influences and 
the same control. A few years ago when one of the 
leading eastern universities discussed the problem of 
opening its doors to women in contradiction to its old 
traditions, the decisive argument against it was that 
the college ought to remain a place of culture, and 
that culture for men means a virile culture. A man's 
college ought above all to be a school of manly char- 
acter and a place of training in a manly attitude to- 
ward the problems of thought and life, not simply a 
scholar factory. This is the thought which has so far 
excluded women from those colleges which stand most 
earnestly for the cultural character of the studies, from 
Harvard, Yale, Columbia and Princeton, however 
hospitable their professional and graduate schools are 
to the feminine scholars. But if a characteristic, virile 
culture is the ideal of many of the leading men's col- 
leges, there cannot be any doubt that the girl's colleges 
must stand for an equally characteristic culture for 
women. 

Whoever overlooks this difference is subconsciously 
influenced by the thought of professional training, 
which is indeed alike for both. But whoever under- 
stands that culture means harmonious development of 
the mind and the securing of attitudes and perspectives, 
love for the unselfish aims of life and fullest power in 



1 5 8; COEDUCATION 

the characteristic realm, must see that a mere imitation 
of men's culture would lead to a sham culture for 
women. There is no use in telling us that men and 
women have the same intellect and the same will and 
the same interests. The question is not how they ap- 
pear isolated, looked on without reference to society 
and to the social unit of the family. With equal 
justice the anatomist may show us that the right hand 
and the left hand have the same number of lingers and 
that the fingers of each are of corresponding length 
and that the whole anatomical structure is exactly the 
same — and yet we would try in vain to put the right 
glove on the left hand. If women are really to gain 
true culture, serviceable to the harmonious life of the 
community, it must be shaped under influences which 
are adjusted to their true needs. A sexless co-culture 
is nothing but pseudo-culture. Whoever has had the 
good fortune to spend a few days on the campus and 
in the halls of Bryn Mawr or Wellesley, of Vassar or 
Smith or Mt. Holyoke, of Barnard or Radcliffe, must 
surely have felt that the beauty and the glory, the 
strength and the value of these colleges result just 
from the fact that they are not simply copies of men's 
institutions. 

But the demands of the community are not confined 
to that which may be expected of woman's intellectual 
and emotional culture. The true life of woman can- 



COEDUCATION 159 

not be conceived without relation to men, and the edu- 
cational fiction of a neutral being must be dangerous 
to the state, like any other fiction which ignores the 
real facts. The consciousness of the difference between 
boys and girls in the years of their best development is 
necessarily a background of their normal growth. Co- 
education can have in this respect two different pos- 
sible influences, both of which are equally undesirable. 
Either this feeling oT difference becomes unwhole- 
somely suppressed or it becomes abnormally sharpened. 
Indeed it is quite possible — careful observers can 
often watch this effect in coeducational institutions — 
that the consciousness of difference between boy and 
girl may become dulled. Then there remains nothing 
of that often claimed advantage that the boys become 
refined by the presence of the girls and that the girls 
become strengthened by the presence of the boys, but 
both become simply insensitive to the presence of the 
other. The common school task absorbs their atten- 
tion and over their Latin and Geometry the girls for- 
get that shirtwaists and skirts do not fit everyone. Of 
course some would say that this is just the ideal situa- 
tion and that feeble sentimentality of the boys and girls 
in the years of sexual tension is replaced by thoughts 
of intellectual work. But while there is no need of 
unhealthy sentimentality, it is not desirable from 
the standpoint of society that nature be tricked by such 



iSo COEDUCATION 

artificial sexlessness. The girls who see how stupidly 
those boys behave in the classroom lose that natural in- 
stinct which together with hunger is doing the most to 
move the machinery of social life. Normal instincts 
can never be suppressed without social vengeance. 
There is no worse form of race suicide than the anni- 
hilation of those feelings by which boys and girls are 
attracted to each other as boys and girls. 

But coeducation produces perhaps still more often 
the opposite effect. The sexual tension is reenforced. 
As the President of the University of Wisconsin says 
with regard to coeducational colleges: "There is un- 
doubtedly a tendency among the women to regard as 
successful the one who is attractive to the young men 
— in other words social availability rather than intel- 
lectual leadership is regarded by at least a consider- 
able number of the young women as the basis of a 
successful college career." There is no reason to argue 
against collegiate coeducation with reference to any 
dangers of vicious immorality. Experience has shown 
that opposition from this quarter can be ignored. But 
the amount of flirtation and effort to play for the other 
sex which has grown up in the coeducational places is 
certainly adverse to the spirit of college work. The 
whole atmosphere in which the girl moves in such a co- 
educational college is too easily " tingling with the 
nervousness of a continuous social function." No 



COEDUCATION 161 

doubt at a time when a certain inner repose, a certain 
unity of purpose and inner harmony would be most 
needed, a constant artificial excitement and over-ten- 
sion is harming the blossoming youth. The social ele- 
ment and the contact with young men is a most desir- 
able supplement to the years of female college educa- 
tion. But the educational and the social functions 
must not be intermingled. The college as such is not 
the right place for the stimulation of the interest in 
men. 

Of course nature sets limits to such artificial 
maneuvering, and consequently we see one further re- 
sult of coeducation which is undesirable in every re- 
spect. By instinct the boys and girls correct the mis- 
take of their educators. When they are brought into 
the same college with the chance to take the same 
courses, they introduce bieducation by choosing dif- 
ferent courses. Some subjects thus simply become 
studies for girls, carefully avoided by the male students, 
and others become the monopoly of the men, never ap- 
proached by the average girl. This development 
seems almost unavoidable. A cultural course which is 
at first taken by boys and girls alike and which is 
equally important for both is likely to find the girls 
more eager and attentive than the boys. The girls 
are therefore doing superior work and the result is 
that the boys feel uncomfortable in the course. In the 



i«2 COEDUCATION 

following year, accordingly, fewer men choose it, and 
as soon as the girls are in a decided majority the boys 
feel out of place. Their little group is huddled to- 
gether in a corner while the classroom belongs to the 
feminine corps. From that time on the course has en- 
tirely lost its grasp on the male students. The same 
development naturally occurs in those courses which 
the boys need and like. The girls are finally ostracized 
there and the ultimate outcome is a segregation which 
has all the disadvantages of coeducation together with 
the possible weaknesses of bieducation. This most 
natural development of different choice of courses has 
already had a most harmful influence on the universi- 
ties themselves. The cultural courses become more 
and more shaped for the girls and the others become 
more and more technical. In this way both groups of 
students become absurdly limited in their choice of sub- 
jects and in the width of their horizon. 

The boys and girls thus instinctively segregate them- 
selves wherever they have the chance. We can hardly 
doubt that if it were left to their own inclination, the 
majority would prefer this division also in those cases 
where they have no chance for it. The experiment of 
a Chicago high school is characteristic. The school be- 
gan three years ago with a programme according to 
which the students recited all lessons in separated 
classes. At the end of the first half year a referendum 



COEDUCATION 163 

of the parents was taken as to the question of whether 
the parents found that the child was benefited by be- 
ing in a segregated class and whether they would ad- 
vise that the plan be extended to the next incoming 
class. Ninety per cent, answered both questions in the 
affirmative. After a further year of trial a second 
referendum was taken with a much enlarged number 
of students and again eighty-five per cent, were de- 
cidedly in favor of segregation. Pupils and parents 
both liked the plan. The pupils say that they get 
closer together, understand one another better and are 
not afraid of being criticised. 

But it is not only the question of liking, nor is it 
merely the question of culture and of social demands; 
it is to a high degree also a question of educational 
technique. Our high schools and our colleges cannot 
reach the highest degree of pedagogical efficiency if 
two such unlike groups of pupils are mixed together. 
No one ought to say, as is too often done in partisan 
discussions, that the mind of the boy is superior to that 
of the girl or vice versa. It is not a question of better 
or worse. They are simply two different kinds of 
minds. This does not exclude our sometimes finding 
girls who show the characteristic features of men's 
minds just as we find boys who have distinctly 
the feminine type of mind. The high school and the 
college are in no way to be adjusted to exceptions. 



1 64 COEDUCATION 

neither to the boyish girl nor to the girlish boy, nor 
even to the genius who breaks all barriers. We want 
our public institutions to be for the average boy and 
girl, and for them it remains true that distinct dif- 
ferences of mental behavior can easily be observed. 
In our day of experimental psychology the facts have 
been brought down to exact data. We know to-day 
that the thought and the imagination, the memory and 
the attention of the boys and girls are characteristically 
different, we know that the whole rhythm of develop- 
ment is unlike and that on the higher levels their tend- 
ency to concentration, to suggestibility, to mental re- 
sistance, to productiveness, to emotion and to will 
action, shows important differences. It is entirely 
meaningless to say that the one is more excellent than 
the other, but it is very clear that to force both to the 
same work in the same rhythm must be a handicap 
for both. It is exactly as the principal of that Chi- 
cago high school reports, who made the experiment 
with the segregation of classes. He says : " In the 
mixed classes neither one helps the other, as each is 
impatient to go on in his or her own course. I wish to 
deny the implication that boys are superior to girls, be- 
cause they finally become or may become intellectual 
leaders, or that girls are superior to boys as shown by 
the scholarship records of every secondary school. 
Our experiment has shown me that each is superior 



COEDUCATION 165; 

in the other sex in the traits of character and the kind 
of intellect nature requires of each. We, the educa- 
tors, have been at fault in not recognizing that men and 
women live and move in parallel courses and that at 
the beginning of that period when nature is trying to 
differentiate the sexes, we have been working against 
her by providing identical instruction, as if the life- 
work of each was to be the same." How much more 
must this be true of the college period in which nature 
not only is trying to differentiate the sexes but has suc- 
ceeded in differentiating them. 

The theorists of the opposite side are simply misled 
by the phantasm of human uniformity. Such an il- 
lusory argument may have done its service when it was 
time to fight for the admission of women to collegiate 
education. Then it may have been wise to emphasize 
those features which indicate equality of intellect and 
therefore equality of rights. But as such a discussion 
is obsolete and as no one any longer disputes the rights 
of women to highest education, we come nearer to the 
truth and therefore nearer to ideal conditions, if we 
frankly acknowledge that the inequality has its claims 
too. The cry for uniformity is in all social problems 
valuable only as a war cry against some unjust and un- 
reasonable discrimination. In periods of peace prog- 
ress demands division of labor, and that is differentia- 
tion. To make society uniform is always moving 



1 66 COEDUCATION 

downward. The recognition of the different aims and 
duties, of the different types of intellects and of emo- 
tion, of the different rhythms of development and of 
the different predominant interests must be to-day the 
most important demand in American education. This 
true progress can be secured only through bieducational 
work. 



THE HOUSEHOLD SCIENCES 



This essay first appeared in the Good Housekeeping 
Magazine 



THE HOUSEHOLD SCIENCES 

IN our American university world only one tend- 
ency remains really constant: the tendency to 
change. Every decade, every year, brings new move- 
ments and new experiments, new inspirations and new 
fads, new truths and new errors. The educational un- 
rest which pervades the pedagogical efforts of our coun- 
try in every stage from the kindergarten upwards, finds 
indeed in the college its most important outlet. This 
unrest is not blameless in all cases. It is often the ex- 
pression of haste and superficiality, of social nervous- 
ness and almost of hysteric desire for changes: more- 
over its aims are not seldom mere notoriety by ec- 
centricity or advertisement, and attractive power by 
cheap indulgence to popular fancies. Yet fundamen- 
tally this unrest in the college world and these frequent 
changes and experiments are the signs of a wholesome 
and most desirable situation. The American college 
would never fulfill its glorious mission for the nation if 
it were not ready to accept and to realize ever new 
ideas and suggestions. 

By far the most characteristic movement of the last 

169 



170 THE HOUSEHOLD SCIENCES 

decade was the wonderful development of the western 
state universities. It is an exaggeration to claim, as 
the enthusiasts of the middle west sometimes do claim, 
that no western boy has any longer a reason for going 
to Harvard or Yale, Columbia or Johns Hopkins or 
Princeton, no western girl for going to Bryn Mawr or 
Radcliffe, to Wellesley or Vassar or Smith. Some 
good reasons do remain, and they mean more than a 
mere worship for a long history and its traditions; 
there is an atmosphere and a spirit which can only 
slowly grow up in the new centers of learning. Per- 
sons who can afford it will probably for a long while 
still continue to send their sons and their daughters 
East, and what they bring home with their bachelor's 
degree will be more than mere social prestige and more 
than the knowledge which they might as well have 
gained within their state boundaries. Nevertheless the 
influence of the new development is tremendous and the 
eastern colleges feel it distinctly. The state universi- 
ties are the crowning parts of public education paid for 
by the public taxes and therefore open to the student at 
the payment of only a nominal fee ; the old colleges are 
endowed institutions and however rich, yet dependent 
upon not inconsiderable fees. Accordingly the eco- 
nomic conditions greatly favor the attendance at the 
western seats of education. Above all, the state uni- 
versity draws young people into college life who with- 



THE HOUSEHOLD SCIENCES 171 

out this stimulation would never have thought of a 
higher education. In the state of New York for every 
one hundred thousand inhabitants less than two hun- 
dred of their sons and daughters are in college, in 
Illinois two hundred and thirty, in Wisconsin two hun- 
dred and forty-six. These much heralded figures do 
not mean quite so much as it may appear ; the youth of 
New York more frequently go to New England or to 
New Jersey than the western boys leave their state; 
moreover the entrance conditions do not stand on the 
same level. But they surely indicate a splendid trend 
toward the enterprising and enthusiastic western uni- 
versities, and perhaps give a useful warning to the 
eastern trustees of wisdom that they must not rest on 
old laurels. 

But this internal growth and rivalry became much 
more significant by the arising of distinctly new uni- 
versity ideas in the new centers of scholarship. The 
nation experienced not simply a duplication or multipli- 
cation of that which existed before, but the vigorous 
spirit of the West created original forms of educational 
influence and almost new types of educational ideals. 
This moreover was not confined to the state universi- 
ties, but endowed institutions like the University of 
Chicago had their important share: they all were 
bristling with new plans and new-fashioned if not revo- 
lutionary principles. Was the new always the good? 



172 THE HOUSEHOLD SCIENCES 

The East was often inclined to doubt it. A mere 
change is not necessarily an improvement. Much ap- 
peared trivial, much hasty, much imprudent, not a few 
variations from the older types were evidently nothing 
but adjustments to a less refined state of intellectual 
culture and to youth with poorer preparation and with 
less academic aims. The result was a somewhat con- 
descending attitude on the part of the eastern sea- 
board. Yet this did not prevent the old universities 
from repeating some of those modern innovations and 
experiments. To a certain degree they were forced 
to it by the demands of rivalry; they did not 
wish to lose ground in the West for the sake of remain- 
ing national and not becoming provincial. To a 
greater degree they imitated unconsciously because 
some ideas which cropped out in the West spread 
quickly and became part of the general pedagogical 
creed of the country. But at many points they 
resisted and turned down the suggestions of the 
restless western spirit as unfit for the academic repose 
and the cultured setting of the eastern colleges and uni- 
versities. It is well known how coeducation appears 
a matter of course in all colleges on the other side of 
the great educational divide and how separated educa- 
tion in the college halls has remained the ideal in the 
stretch from Boston to Washington. 

The last years have brought another new western 



THE HOUSEHOLD SCIENCES 173 

experiment, which to-day can hardly be called an ex- 
periment any longer, as ft has succeeded splendidly and 
hence has certainly come to stay in those regions where 
it was started. The question is whether it will spread 
beyond its original western birthplace and whether it 
will find an entrance into the conservative East, which 
as yet seems vehemently opposed to the proposed in- 
trusion. This time the women students alone are con- 
cerned; it is therefore only a matter for the large lead- 
ing women's colleges of the East whether they will 
finally resist or finally yield. The problem is the in- 
troduction of home economics or household sciences, or 
whatever we may prefer to call that new branch of 
studies, into the college curriculum. The source of the 
opposition is familiar. College education is to lead 
the mind of the young woman to all which is true and 
beautiful and noble, to a realm of ideals and inspira- 
tion, far removed from the sordidness of practical life 
with its commercial interests and its common technical 
pursuits. The college years are the one time in the 
woman's life career in which everything is to appeal to 
her purest and finest emotions and is to stimulate her 
highest mental energies. Have we a right to fill this 
time too with the trivial miseries of household care 
and turn the enthusiastic eye of the young woman from 
the Parthenon to the kitchen utensils and the sewing 
table? That may be all right for special commercial 



i 7 4 THE HOUSEHOLD SCIENCES 

schools and industrial pseudo-colleges ; that may fit Sim- 
mons, but it would distort and injure Bryn Mawr. 

This feeling of repugnance, which frequently has 
grown into indignation, is not a little strengthened by 
the knowledge of some of the motives which evidently 
have entered into this campaign of the state universi- 
ties. Everybody knows that the farmers of the Middle 
West have more enthusiasm for good harvests and for 
reduction of the household expenses than for Greek 
literature or radioactivity. Their state legislature will 
accordingly be more easily cajoled into voting public 
money for the increasing expenditures of the state uni- 
versity when the practical instruction stands in the fore- 
ground and makes a showing which appeals to every- 
one in the crowd. Agriculture for the boys and do- 
mestic science for the girls fulfill this desire exactly. 
Hence the introduction of domestic science may be a 
clever political move in the budget game out there in 
the western state capitals, but such politics finds no 
place in the private institutions. Even if their trus- 
tees were to listen to such financial arguments, they 
would probably calculate that the number of students 
and accordingly the income will be the larger, the 
more firmly they uphold the cultural ideas of the sur- 
rounding eastern community. Yet fortunately they 
are anyhow independent of such practical speculations, 
and can ask straightway: what is the best for a college 



THE HOUSEHOLD SCIENCES 175 

student? Only on this ideal level ought the question 
to be answered everywhere: if the decision has to be 
that home economics is unbecoming for a true college 
and adverse to its ideal interests, the taxpayers and 
legislatures ought to be educated up to the better in- 
sight. But is such a negative decision really demanded 
by the true meaning of the college as a place of liberal 
culture? Is he who believes in domestic science as an 
organic part of a college education really disloyal to 
the highest ideals of the eastern traditions? 

The detailed plan for such household courses is of 
course not uniform. In various universities the pro- 
gramme shows characteristic differences. Yet certain 
chief features seem to be repeated almost everywhere 
on a more or less imposing scale, with more or less 
elaboration and with richer or more modest equipment. 
Everywhere a large part of the college work in the de- 
partment of household sciences naturally belongs to the 
study of food in its widest aspects. The chemical 
composition of food, its manufacture, its changes by 
heat or cold or fermentation, furthermore its physiolog- 
ical effect on the body, the bacteriological problems, the 
principles of diet, the relation of food to health, to age, 
to sex, to occupation, and finally its economic side, its 
selection, its preservation, its fullest utilization, the 
tests for food alterations, the pure food laws, are the 
chief topics. Many of them demand laboratory exer- 



176 THE HOUSEHOLD SCIENCES 

cises and practical investigations. Another large 
group which is prominent in all programmes refers to 
the house as such. There the interest turns on the one 
side to the architecture and sanitation, including the 
study of surroundings and construction, of soil, drain- 
age, ventilation, heating, and extending to real house 
planning and to practice in making skeleton plans. On 
the other side it turns to the house decoration, with 
special reference to the aesthetic and historical aspect 
of furniture, to the color harmonies, to the discrimina- 
tion of rugs, of wall papers and so forth. A third 
group deals with textiles, their manufacture, their se- 
lection, their microscopic and chemical analysis, the 
hygienic and aesthetic aspects of cloth, the physical and 
chemical problems of laundry work and many related 
questions. Finally we find everywhere a scholarly 
study of household management, in which the organ- 
ization of the household, the expenditures of the family 
income, care of the house, principles of nursing, and 
similar domestic activities are considered. In some 
universities we also find courses in sewing and dress- 
making with practical exercises. In others special em- 
phasis is laid on medical nursing. Again other institu- 
tions offer courses in " humanics " in which the center 
lies in the problem of the child and his development 
from infancy to adolescence. 

How does such a programme fit into the general 



THE HOUSEHOLD SCIENCES 177 

plan of college work, if we interpret the meaning of 
college education in that conservative spirit which pre- 
vails in the East? Of course there is a possible view 
of university purposes for which such a traditional 
11 cultural " intention excites only ridicule. The uni- 
versity, the opponents say, is the place at which every- 
body ought to have a chance to learn everything which 
has any importance for him; it ought to be the great 
department store for knowledge in which you may find 
everything which men know and learn; and as many a 
boy or girl prefers to learn typewriting or metal cutting 
or to study about farms or the stock market to the 
reading of Sanskrit or the interpreting of Milton, let 
us by all means have the useful, practical, study courses 
on our warehouse counters. For one who takes such 
a view no problem and no question is here involved. 
To know how to manage the household, how to buy 
food and how to select the wall papers is a useful ac- 
quirement, and if it can be learned, surely the college 
must give the opportunity. But the authorities of the 
best eastern universities would not only object to such 
a view; they would consider it as a prostitution of their 
ideals. The college, they would claim, is not to offer 
to everybody everything, but only to the well-prepared 
ones that which will help them toward a fuller develop- 
ment of their inner life and which will prepare them to 
build up their vocational or avocational later life on a 



178 THE HOUSEHOLD SCIENCES 

broader and firmer foundation. The much misused 
word culture after all signifies the meaning better than 
any other; it emphasizes that all strictly technical and 
practical teaching, however important it may be, does 
not belong there. The lawyer, the physician, the en- 
gineer, would never seek his professional training in 
the undergraduate college course; the technical and 
professional instruction of the less complex type like 
that of the household may in the same way be relegated 
to special institutions, but must not be allowed to tres- 
pass upon the academic yard. 

This tendency against professionalization in the col- 
lege period is indeed not weakening in the East, but 
rather growing stronger. We may consider as typical 
the changes in Harvard College which for many years 
was most progressive in the direction of perfectly free 
election of college courses. Certainly the courses of- 
fered were only those of cultural value, but among 
them every student had complete liberty to take or not 
to take what he pleased, and that after all meant a 
certain concession to the professional spirit. The stu- 
dent would naturally be under a temptation to select 
only such courses as stood in a definite relation to his 
later specialized life work: the future physician cannot 
pursue medical courses in his undergraduate years, but 
he felt inclined to take exclusively courses in the natural 
sciences which helped him toward his later studies in 



THE HOUSEHOLD SCIENCES 179 

the medical school and he neglected his opportunity 
to broaden his mind by humanistic interests. This in- 
direct help toward onesided professionalism has re- 
cently been exterminated even in Harvard ; v the practice 
of many years was changed two years ago into an edu- 
cational policy which insists on a certain breadth of 
studies. The courses are divided into four large 
groups and every student has to choose some work in 
every one; he cannot go toward graduation with 
natural science only, but must also have some studies in 
history, in languages and so on. If in this way even 
the leader in the movement for free election has 
yielded, it may be acknowledged that the unprofes- 
sional character of the college is to be upheld for the 
near future. But does this really exclude the house- 
hold sciences? 

Of course we abstract from the work of that small 
minority of students who devote themselves to the 
domestic studies in order to use them for a professional 
life career. Several such careers stand open. Some 
wish to teach home economics in the secondary schools 
or in commercial institutions ; some plan to devote them- 
selves to vocational work as dietitians or as sanitary 
inspectors or as managers of food laboratories or as 
designers in commercial industries, or as interior deco- 
rators and so on ; some finally, intend to carry out scien- 
tific research in home economics in the service of biology 



1 80 THE HOUSEHOLD SCIENCES 

or of political economy. All this is important, but it 
does not directly concern the college question. If this 
group of students alone were involved, it would be 
wiser to hand it all over to special technical schools or 
to the graduate departments of the universities. Some 
of the state universities indeed have advanced courses 
for such future specialists in their graduate schools, 
seminary courses in research or courses on the teaching 
of home economics and similar professional instruction. 
Wherever domestic sciences are taught in college, these 
specialists may partake in them in order to go further 
on in the field, but their interest has no right to decide 
whether such studies are fitted for college. Our intro- 
ductory undergraduate work ought always to steer clear 
of overtender respect for later professional specialists, 
as otherwise the rights of the overwhelming majority 
become neglected. I am lecturing on psychology in 
Harvard this year before four hundred and twenty 
undergraduates who have selected my course, but I 
hope that surely no more than a score will become 
psychologists for life and will be concerned with psy- 
chology ten years hence; the course belongs therefore 
by right to the four hundred other men who take it for 
their cultural growth and expression. Nobody doubts 
that the study of psychology or philosophy or literature 
or history or physics can have this cultural significance ; 



THE HOUSEHOLD SCIENCES 181 

the problem is whether we have the right to claim such 
a value for home economics. 

By all means let us not forget that cultural does not 
mean or in the least suggest that a study ought to be 
practically useless. It is true that some opponents of 
the traditional college have delighted in picturing the 
usual college studies as merely ornamental fancies as if 
the students were trained there in a kind of intellectual 
calisthenics. That is nothing but a caricature. Not 
mental dancing but mental athletics are taught in col- 
lege, and that brings to the youth a gain in mental 
strength and power useful and helpful for every effort 
in practical life. But even in a more technical sense 
the applicability of a study does not contradict its fit- 
ness for the college curriculum. As I said, nobody 
doubts that I am giving a cultural course when I am 
teaching my class in psychology, and yet a considerable 
part of that work is devoted to problems of practical 
application. We consider carefully in what way the 
facts of psychology may be made serviceable to school 
education or to the needs of the courtroom or to voca- 
tional guidance or to psychotherapy, and I confidently 
hope that many of my students when they go out into 
the world as teachers or lawyers or physicians or busi- 
ness men will find their psychological studies useful in 
their daily life and helpful for the solution of many 



1 82 THE HOUSEHOLD SCIENCES 

very practical problems. It is certainly no different 
with studies in economics and government or in physics, 
chemistry, biology, mathematics, geography, and nobody 
who devotes much of his college time to cultural studies 
in modern foreign languages and literatures will disre- 
gard the practical advantage of his proficiency in un- 
derstanding the language for actual usage. Within 
these reasonable limits the usefulness of the courses not 
only does not contradict the demand for culture, but is 
directly demanded by it and harmonizes perfectly with 
it. The college time is certainly not to detach anyone 
from the great world which awaits him with its serious 
demands. It is not by chance that the new Harvard 
plan while it forbids a professional onesidedness at the 
same time insists that a certain large part of the chosen 
courses be clustered in one particular field; a mere nib- 
bling of all kinds of studies is no preparation for the 
earnest tasks of life: the concentration of studies is 
early to point to a unified aim in the future. The col- 
lege bred youth is never to be severed from the practical 
world by his culture courses, but to be brought to a 
point of outlook from which that practical world is 
understood in its truer connections and deeper meaning. 
The mere fact that the studies in home economics will 
be useful to a girl whether she marry or not, and 
that they will later on help her in her problems of the 
day, is therefore not the least objection to their cultural 



THE HOUSEHOLD SCIENCES 183 

standing, provided that such culture value exists at all. 
But after all what is the test for this value? We 
have already pointed to the most essential criterion as 
far as the subject matter of a special study is concerned. 
Any study is a fit part of general higher education, if 
it contributes to an understanding of life and the world 
in their inner connections. To see nothing in isolation, 
but everything in its relations to causes and effects, to 
purposes and developments, to see, in short, everything 
against the background of the natural laws and of the 
history of civilization: this characterizes the truly edu- 
cated, as it makes him able to see foreground and back- 
ground in their true proportions. Not everybody can, 
or ought to, understand everything, as no one comes in 
contact with every feature of the social and natural 
world. But at least that fraction of the world in 
which our individual life is embedded, the history of 
our institutions and national life, of our art and liter- 
ature and language,* the principles of the nature which 
surrounds us and of our technical agencies, of our mind 
and our body, of our social aims and ideals, ought to 
be brought within reach of everyone who seeks the 
highest level of cultural education. Beyond that point 
the professional detail begins, which may interest the 
lawyer but not the engineer, or vice versa, but all this 
refers to the world which is common to all in our 
national circle. Yet, even in this circle, there is some 



1 84 THE HOUSEHOLD SCIENCES 

differentiation, or at least some shading. The facts of 
government and politics and certain aspects of econom- 
ics belong essentially to the world in which the aver- 
age man has to work out his daily life; they are surely 
not foreign to women's experiences, yet they are sec- 
ondary for her activity. If she studies them in a thor- 
ough way, it takes a kind of professional character; it 
is not an essential part of her cultural education. Cor- 
respondingly the problems of the house and the house- 
hold, of food and clothing are organic parts of the 
world in which the average woman in our social or- 
ganization has to work out her destiny. Man is in 
contact with them, but they are secondary for his 
achievements; hence if he were to study them, it would 
be professional, not cultural interest. For the woman, 
however, nothing can be a truer part of cultural educa- 
tion, if culture really means the ability to see the offer- 
ings and questions of our particular world not isolated, 
detached, accidental, but against the background of law 
and development. 

To use the telephone and to send a wireless message 
without understanding of the principles of electricity, or 
to talk party politics without knowledge of American 
history, is typical of the uncultured ; is it less uncultured 
to be in practical contact with shelter, food and cloth- 
ing and yet to be unaware of the relations in which 
every single piece stands to a world of past and present 



THE HOUSEHOLD SCIENCES 185 

and future facts? No bit of furniture stands in our 
room of which every detail does not possess a long and 
complex history, often reflecting the whole history of 
human progress. Every form and curve of the chair 
and the table, every design in the wall paper and the 
rug, every variation of the bed or the mirror, of the 
spoon or the glass, is a part of a fascinating story 
of development. But besides the historical aspect the 
aesthetic viewpoint demands its right. Every piece 
then becomes an organic part of a harmonious whole in 
which the life totality of a worthy personality is ex- 
pressed. Every patch of color, every ornament, every 
characteristic form of the smallest piece as well as of 
the largest becomes suggestive and significant in this 
wider aesthetic setting. And finally each piece is made 
from material which nature supplied and which industry 
has shaped; each is thus linked with knowledge of the 
natural substances which biology and chemistry describe 
and with the knowledge of the industrial processes. 
Accordingly the tray or the vase or the picture frame, 
the rocking chair or the piano or the little rug in our 
room are accidental and meaningless as long as we 
take them disconnectedly. But as soon as we have 
acquired the necessary deeper knowledge, each of them 
leads us to the whole of social history, to the structure 
and laws of nature, to the processes of human industry 
and to the demands of aesthetics and indirectly of mo- 



1 86 THE HOUSEHOLD SCIENCES 

rality. Each apparently insignificant object becomes a 
center of crystallization for most manifold interests; a 
richness of relations is now understood which is dead 
to the unprepared, and this is the test and the mean- 
ing of culture. Exactly the same is of course true of 
food or clothing or shelter. In the case of food the 
historical and aesthetic relations exist but become less 
essential; in their place we have the very important 
connections with 'health and disease, with the bodily 
functions related to occupational work, to sex and age; 
on the other hand the conditions of their production, 
the relations to the kingdoms of animals and plants and 
to the physical and chemical processes in the kitchen, 
and finally their complex relations to the national econ- 
omy, to the conditions of the world market and to the 
social principles of home economy. In short the cup 
of tea at the breakfast table may to the naive mind be 
just tea in a cup, and that is all. To the trained mind 
both the cup and the tea are the crossing points of 
thousandfold interests. The cup connects itself with 
the history of the forms of pottery through thousands 
of years, it links itself with the chemistry of porcelain, 
it evokes a world of aesthetic considerations. At the 
same time the tea becomes related to the natural his- 
tory of the tea plant, to the technical processes and to 
the economic conditions which lead to its appearance 
on the market, to the physics of its preparation, to its 



THE HOUSEHOLD SCIENCES 187 

effect on the nervous system, to its value in the whole 
scheme of nourishment. Nor will the cup of tea be 
any less tempting, because a background of culture 
has set it into a world of significant connections. A 
woman cannot take a nobler power from her college 
life into the turmoil of the world than the gift of see- 
ing every element of the home in this wider perspective, 
that is of substituting the cultural aspect for the trivial 
one. 

The necessary consequence, to be sure, is that in- 
struction in home economics belongs in a college only 
if it is really given for this purpose of widening the per- 
spective and interpreting the single fact by its relation 
to the whole social, historical, naturalistic and aesthetic 
background. As soon as the teaching of domestic 
sciences sticks to the accidental facts and refers only to 
the external technique, its place is in a technical house- 
hold school and not in the college. A practical course 
in cooking or sewing is certainly a useful and important 
exercise for many girls, but to introduce it into the col- 
lege world means indeed to give up the true college 
ideal. The state university which announces a course 
in which " a heavy skirt and a single-lined dress is 
made " and another course in which " a suit of under- 
wear is sewed " and " attention is paid to the mending 
of clothing " cannot possibly be an example for 
eastern colleges. But most of the state universi- 



1 88 THE HOUSEHOLD SCIENCES 

ties keep away from such concessions to the de- 
sire for mere technical skill. The colleges do not 
teach piano practice either, although they provide 
courses in the history and theory of music. The col- 
lege is no place to learn cooking and mending, but 
what the true studies in domestic sciences offer, with 
their wealth of historical, sociological, biological, chem- 
ical, aesthetic and economical information, is endlessly 
better and it ought not to be missed in any women's 
college which aims toward real culture. 

The effect would in the first place be practical. 
Where an immense waste of means, of strength, of 
time, of health, has been going on, a well-planned ad- 
justment to the economic and biological conditions would 
begin. It is claimed that nearly ten billion dollars are 
spent annually in the United States by women for 
household maintenance; yet it is spent without that 
deeper knowledge of the material, its sources, its ef- 
fects, its characteristics, which would be demanded in 
any other large economic transactions. Not only the 
budget but the bodily health of the family and through 
it the whole nation must suffer. The waste of national 
resources through the public recklessness toward the 
forests and the mines has finally aroused the conscience 
of the whole land; the economic waste in the families 
through woman's lack of deeper understanding of 
household sciences is still more appalling. 



THE HOUSEHOLD SCIENCES 189 

But the practical good will be accompanied by ideal 
gains. The gain in home happiness resulting from 
better health and greater savings, must follow immedi- 
ately. But besides it no one can overestimate the gain 
through the aesthetic pleasures which may be hoped for. 
There is no denying that the overwhelming mass of 
American homes, rich or poor alike, show little taste, 
endlessly less than the female inhabitants of the house 
demonstrate in their dresses. The dress of the home 
cannot be bought completed from the tailor who is after 
all a specialist; the dress of the home results from the 
work of those who live in it and their culture becomes 
decisive. It is an easy thing to pick up a vase or a 
chair on a bargain counter, but it needs a firm cultural 
background to determine whether they will contribute 
to a noble harmonious whole or whether they will be in 
disharmony with the aesthetic spirit of the room for 
which they are planned. The American nation, strong 
in its ethical instincts, is in the midst of acquiring 
aesthetic feelings, and they must slowly grow by irra- 
diating from the home. Only when the house, the 
room, the meal, are attractive and beautiful, will the 
spirit of beauty reach out to the whole town and sur- 
roundings. Yet the ideal gain lies still in another 
direction. The household work and the householder 
alike suffer from the depressing idea that the work of 
the housekeeper is drudgery. It is well known that 



1 9 o THE HOUSEHOLD SCIENCES 

this is the chief source for much of the dissatisfaction 
and restlessness in the world of women. Now the 
truth is that every human being's life work is in its 
largest part drudgery, if the elements of the work are 
taken isolated and detached, and they become interest- 
ing and inspiring if they are viewed in their deeper 
relations. As soon as you analyze the doctor's or the 
lawyer's or the teacher's or the manufacturer's work, 
each little part in itself seems trivial, unimportant, ac- 
cidental and therefore tiresome and hardly worth 
while, but as soon as the wider connections are under- 
stood, even the smallest becomes significant. A woman 
who sees the detail of her home work in the light of 
broad knowledge no longer knows it as drudgery; every 
little piece in the household bristles with interests, every 
activity of hers is linked with all mankind, aesthetic and 
moral, hygienic and economic problems of highest im- 
portance suddenly seem involved in apparently little 
matters, the whole surroundings become luminous and 
wonderful. It would be more than can be hoped if 
the blessing of such cultural knowledge would fill the 
heart of every good woman in the land, but it ought at 
least not to be withheld from those fortunate ones who 
can devote four of their best years to their highest edu- 
cation on the college grounds. 



THE GERMANS AT SCHOOL 



This essay first appeared in the Popular Science 
Monthly 



THE GERMANS AT SCHOOL 

AT the time of their political weakness the Ger- 
mans were derisively called the thinkers and 
dreamers. When the other great nations divided the 
world of reality among themselves, the Germans took 
refuge in the realm of fancy. The stronger peoples 
considered them as the members of a rich household 
look on the poor schoolmaster at their table. That 
time has passed away. The politics and commerce and 
industry of Germany have secured its powerful posi- 
tion in the world, and no one doubts the strength of the 
Germans in the field of the real facts. But there was 
mingled with the derisive mood of previous times a 
silent respect for that German idealism. The name 
of thinkers and dreamers appeared to some, and not to 
the worst, a title of honor. The world acknowledged 
that in scholarship and research and education the Ger- 
mans were able to teach mankind. Their schools were 
models and their methods superior, and in the days of 
war the world accepted the saying that the German 
schoolmaster had won the battles. How much of this 
honor and glory has been left in these times of German 

193 



194 THE GERMANS AT SCHOOL 

commercial, industrial and political advance? Has the 
forward striving in the realm of might and power 
meant loss of prestige, and, what is more important, 
loss of true achievement in the field of thought and 
education, or did the progress of modern Germany in- 
volve as much intellectual gain as practical profit? 
The Germans at work easily win the admiration of 
every visitor who goes to their centers of industry. 
Are the Germans at school equally deserving of honor- 
able praise, or are they simply resting on their laurels ? 
The educational life of a country is always a great 
organism in which all parts are interdependent. There 
cannot be good schools without good universities, nor 
good universities without good schools. The quality 
of the teachers and the quality of the pupils, the gen- 
eral education and the special instruction are all inti- 
mately related to one another. We must look into this 
organic system if we want to ascertain its strength and 
endurance. A few educational show pieces are not 
enough. Is there progress and growth in all the es- 
sential parts? We may begin with the German uni- 
versity, which is, after all, the real heart of the whole 
organism and which had more direct influence on 
American educational life than any other part of the 
German educational system. Those who built up the 
great American institutions in the last generation from 
mere colleges into true universities had received the 



THE GERMANS AT SCHOOL 195. 

decisive impulses in German academic halls. To be 
sure in recent years a kind of reaction has set in in 
America. The tradition that German university work 
represents the highest standards of scholarship has re- 
cently been roughly handled by skeptics. Some have 
claimed that German university research is too special- 
istic and on that account too narrow. The German 
scholars lack the wide perspective which has been char- 
asteristic of so much of the best English work. Others 
insist that the structure of the German publications is 
formless. They long for the French polish and clear- 
ness. Some blame the German professors for a cer- 
tain remoteness from life and feel that American 
scholarship will abolish this kind of " scholarship for 
scholars " and will again unite science and life. 

It was inevitable that such a reaction should occur. 
The young generation of American instructors found 
a situation entirely different from that which their 
teachers had found some decades before. Great 
American universities had been built up in the mean- 
time and had created a new spirit of scholarly inde- 
pendence which naturally took the turn of a slight 
opposition to the former masters. But such reactions 
are only passing moods. Those who know German 
scholarship to-day have no doubt that all these accusa- 
tions never have had less justice than at present. Cer- 
tainly German scholarship is specialistic, and there will 



e 9 6 THE GERMAN'S AT SCHOOL 

never be any true scholarship which is not founded on 
specialistic work. Any thorough research must be 
specialistic, and research without thoroughness can 
never secure lasting results. But the work of the great 
German naturalists and historians has shown at all 
times the tendency to wide generalizations, and the 
present day perhaps more than the last half century is 
again filled with broad philosophical endeavor. Still 
more unfair is the often repeated cry against the form- 
lessness of German scholarship. Not every doctor's 
thesis can be a thing of beauty, but perhaps there has 
never been a time in which the German language has 
been so shaped by aesthetic ideals. The German book- 
binders were for a long while notorious for tasteless 
covers, but the general opinion in recent international 
exhibitions has been that now no country makes more 
beautiful bindings than Germany. This artistic im- 
provement of the book is not confined to the cover. 
The content of the German book shows a literary finish 
in structure and style which ought not to be overlooked. 
Finally, as to the aloofness of German scholarship, the 
triumphs of modern German technique and medical 
therapy speak loudly enough of the comradeship be- 
tween science and life. And how could it be other 
wise in a country which has become so money-hunting 
and practical? The best proof of the injustice of such 
accusations and attacks lies in the number of American 



THE GERMANS AT SCHOOL 197 

students who still feel attracted by the German aca- 
demic atmosphere in spite of the wonderful development 
of American higher institutions of learning. 

Winter before last there were three hundred Ameri- 
can students in German universities, and it must not be 
forgotten that these young men and women are not 
undergraduate college students, but that the German 
university welcomes them only if they can show their 
college diploma. The German semesters correspond 
to the study in the postgraduate departments of the 
American universities. As Director of the Amerika- 
Institut, I wrote to these three hundred delegates of 
the new world and asked them with what training they 
came and for what purpose, whether they felt satisfied 
or whether they found anything of which to complain, 
what they were doing and what they were intending to 
do, and what they could suggest. The answers display 
an interesting variety. The young American scholars 
came from all parts of the country and their favorite 
spots in Germany are Berlin, Leipzig, Munich, Heidel- 
berg and Gottingen. In their studies naturally the 
German language and German literature take the lead, 
but philosophy, history, political economy and, in the 
line of science, chemistry and medicine stand next. 
Mathematics is also often chosen, and, on the whole, 
there is no corner in the field of learning to which some 
Americans are not turning. Lowest in the list is the 



i 9 8 THE GERMANS AT SCHOOL 

study of law, which of course is best pursued in one's 
own country. As to their aims and reasons for com- 
ing to Germany, some, to be sure, had no deeper argu- 
ment than that they " had a fellowship," and some that 
there " is no special reason.'' Some wanted to see a 
foreign civilization at first-hand in order to be able to 
judge more correctly of their own, or to study German 
in order to teach it in America. But the overwhelming 
majority insisted that there was still superior oppor- 
tunity for their special branches in German institutions 
and that the most thorough and deepest preparation 
could still be gained on German soil. The two funda- 
mental tones of the replies were given by the one who 
wrote: "I came to train myself to think independ- 
ently," and by the other who Wrote : " The best that was 
offered me in the American lecture room, library and 
seminary was the fruit directly or indirectly of German 
research. I wished to come into intimate contact with 
it." As to their satisfaction with the results, praise 
and complaint were intermingled. Many asserted that 
they were entirely satisfied, not a few expressing them- 
selves in terms of enthusiasm. Some limited their ap- 
proval to certain sides: " Very well satisfied with intel- 
lectual side of the university, but have not received 
much help religiously." Others miss the American 
sports or the social life among students. Many are 
dissatisfied with the lack of personal contact with pro- 



THE GERMANS AT SCHOOL 199 

fessors. Again some complain that the student finds 
no oversight and is not called to account and that ac- 
cordingly too much loafing is possible. Some complain 
that the attendants do not understand English or that 
the libraries do not give out the books quickly enough. 
Some suggest more opportunities for learning the lan- 
guage, others demand the removal of evil social influ- 
ences and student drunkenness. But there is an almost 
surprising unity in the instinctive acknowledgment of 
the admirable methods of research and of highly ad- 
vanced instruction. This cordial appreciation by those 
who stand in the midst of the German influences cor- 
responds to the judgment of all who see German aca- 
demic life with impartial eyes. There is an intensity 
in the search for truth and an eagerness for the devel- 
opment of the best scholarly methods which is still un- 
surpassed in the world. 

The weaknesses of the German university are not 
few. To those who come from American traditions the 
most regrettable difference is the lack of interest in the 
student's life. The student is practically left to him- 
self. This is true as to his social life and true as to his 
studies. No one supervises him, no one cares whether 
he is industrious or lazy, and the result is that many a 
weak man comes to grief who might have succeeded 
with the help and control of the American system. 
But these defects of the German university as educa- 



200 THE GERMANS AT SCHOOL 

tional Institutions are the necessary counterparts of 
their excellence as places of independent scholarship. 
The highest goal of intellectual achievement will al- 
ways be reached only in complete freedom, and this 
freedom is somewhat dangerous for the weak man. 
There can be no doubt that the German system is in- 
deed much more adjusted to those above the average 
than to those below, and the opposite is true of the 
American system. But it is not only the lack of per- 
sonal help and the demand for his own activity which 
is in contrast with the American ample provisions for 
intellectual support. Even the choice of the teachers 
differs in the same direction. The American instructor 
is appointed, above all, because he is a good teacher; 
the German because he is an important contributor to 
the advancement of knowledge. He may be and not 
seldom is a poor teacher. Yet the German university 
ideal suggests that the true student will profit more 
from the contact with a man who has mastered the 
method of research than from any inferior scholar, 
however effective he may be as a teacher. 

The Germans themselves are far from considering 
their universities perfect. Intense reforms are re- 
shaping the entire university life, but it is characteristic 
that no so-called reform propositions are taking hold 
which limit in any way the freedom of study. The 
Germans do not want more examinations bv which the 



THE GERMANS AT SCHOOL 201 

student becomes more or less a school pupil, although 
they believe in thorough discipline and supervision even 
in the highest classes of the Gymnasium, which corre- 
sponds to the average American college. The most 
wholesome change in the student life is the quiet but 
steady repression of the vulgar beer-drinking habits 
with all the noisy accessories. The entire student life 
has become cleaner and more modern. The old tra- 
ditions had come from a time when the young academic 
scholar wanted to emphasize the contrast between his 
eager life and the dullness of the philistine crowd. 
But modern times have changed this contrast by bring- 
ing life and interest and political activity into those 
crowds and the student has thus lost his right to live a 
life entirely different from that of his social surround- 
ings. The rush of young Germany toward the uni- 
versity is still steadily increasing. There are about 
63,000 students in the twenty-one high seats of learn- 
ing, 12,000 in the law schools, 12,000 in the medical 
schools, about 4,000 students of divinity and the re- 
mainder in the so-called philosophical faculty which 
corresponds to the American graduate school. It is 
characteristic that the chief increase has come to the 
universities in the large cities in which the oldfash- 
ioned student life has always played a small role. In 
Berlin there are 14,000 persons attending the lectures 
and in Munich 7,000, in Leipzig 6,000. Yet espe- 



202 THE GERMANS AT SCHOOL 

daily those universities in small towns which are famous 
for the beauty of landscape have had their proportion- 
ate growth. In lovely Freiburg in Baden the one 
thousandth student was welcomed with a celebration at 
the time when I came there as a young instructor. Re- 
cently they have celebrated the coming of the three 
thousandth student. The rapid growth of the aca- 
demic communities strongly suggests the foundation of 
new universities. Minister in Westphalia grew into a 
fullEedged university only a few years ago, Frank- 
fort-on-Main has just succeeded in its enthusiastic fight 
for the development of its academy into a university. 
The Prussian Diet seriously objected to this ambi- 
tion of the citizens of Frankfort, as it feared that the 
smaller universities in the neighborhood would be the 
sufferers, but the university of Frankfort is now a 
reality. The same may be expected of the university 
of Hamburg, which so far consists of a number 
of interrelated institutes. But while the universi- 
ties are growing in number and branching off in 
new and ever new specialties, they are also being 
supplemented by new forms of scholarly activity. 
The most characteristic new feature which gains 
increasing importance is the erection of research 
institutes, especially in the field of natural science and 
medicine. There investigations can be carried on with- 
out anv reference to instruction, the scholars are dis- 



THE GERMANS AT SCHOOL 203 

burdened from every educational responsibility, and 
the progress of knowledge becomes the only goal. At 
the same time the number of technical schools on the 
level of the universities has been increased to twelve, 
since those of Danzig and Breslau have recently come 
into existence, and Germany's famous mining schools, 
forest schools, agricultural schools and veterinary 
schools show the same signs of flourishing life. 

The greatest change, however, in the academic life 
of the nation has come through the new regulations 
which link the university with the schools. The Amer- 
ican schools have usually left a certain freedom in the 
choice of studies within a single institution. In the 
same high school the boy can take a classical course or 
a more realistic course. Germany has always had sep- 
arate schools for the different schemes of preparation. 
The higher schools which engaged the boys to the nine- 
teenth or twentieth year have always been of three 
types, the Gymnasium which puts the chief emphasis 
on Latin and Greek, the Realgymnasium which omits 
the Greek and emphasizes modern languages and 
the Oberrealschule which has very little Latin but 
much natural science. They correspond roughly to the 
American high school and a modest American college 
or the first two or three years of the best colleges. 
The tradition allowed only those who had the certifi- 
cate of the Gymnasium to take up the study of law, 



2o 4 THE GERMANS AT SCHOOL 

medicine, divinity and philology. The university study 
of natural sciences and of modern languages besides a 
number of practical callings were the only goals acces- 
sible to those who came from the other two types of 
schools. Long struggles which excited all Germany 
led to the abolition of this monopoly by classical educa- 
tion. With the year 1902 the great modern school 
reform began and every year has brought new advance. 
To-day practically every boy who has passed through 
a school of any one of the three types finds the doors 
of the university wide open, whatever profession he 
may choose. It may be too early to judge whether 
only advantages will follow in the train of this reform. 
There are not a few who are afraid that the realistic 
schooling of the future lawyers and government officers 
may be a danger to the idealistic character of the na- 
tional life, and there are many who believe that even 
the physician needs to read his Plato in school time 
more than to begin at once with the chemical labora- 
tory. But in any case the great change has brought 
fresh air into the academic halls. The second great 
change was the full admission of women. For a long 
time they had the permission to attend lectures but no 
academic rights equal to those of men could be ac- 
knowledged for the women students until they should 
bring to the entrance door of the university the same 
certificate as the boys were expected to bring from their 



THE GERMANS AT SCHOOL 205 

schools. The real advance of the women in the uni- 
versity sphere depended upon the establishment of 
girls' schools which would lead to exactly the same goal 
as the Gymnasium for boys. This was at last accom- 
plished by the splendid organization of girls' instruction 
of three years ago. 

Prussia has now four types of higher schools for 
girls, each of which may be divided into various inde- 
pendent departments. In the center stands the upper 
girls' school, a somewhat revised edition of the tradi- 
tional German school for girls. There are ten classes 
which are usually passed through in the period from the 
sixth to the sixteenth year. The first three classes are 
preparatory, with eight to ten hours a week instruction 
in the mother tongue, three hours arithmetic every 
week, two to three hours writing, two hours needle- 
work, three hours of religion, which is an organic part 
of every German school, two half hours of singing, two 
half hours of gymnastics and some drawing as well. 
In the seven upper classes the German language takes 
six, five and finally four hours a week, and French ex- 
actly the same number, altogether thirty-two hours each 
in those seven years. English is taught in the four 
upper classes only four hours a week, mathematics three 
hours a week throughout, geography two hours through 
the seven years, natural history two hours, religion two 
hours, drawing two hours, singing two hours, gymnastics 



20(g THE GERMANS AT SCHOOL 

two hours, needlework two hours, but this is no longer 
obligatory in the four upper classes. Those who have 
passed through this ten years' course may enter either 
the so-called Frauenschule or the Seminary or the 
Studienanstalt. The first is planned to complete the 
education of a young woman who seeks a higher train- 
ing without any professional aim. It is adjusted to the 
needs of women who are to play an intelligent role, 
not only in the home, but also in social life. It is in 
no way a finishing school for one who aims to shine in 
society, but meant for those who really want to serve. 
It is usually a course of two years in which pedagogy, 
household economy, kindergarten work, hygiene, po- 
litical economy, civics, bookkeeping and needlework 
stand in the foreground, while modern languages, his- 
tory, literature, natural science, art, drawing and music 
are relegated to the position of minor electives. 

The Seminary, on the other hand, is meant for those 
who aim to become teachers of the lower schools. It 
demands three years' scholarly work and one year of 
practical training in schools. In those three years of 
theoretical study, French, English and mathematics 
take four hours a week each year, German, natural 
science and religion three hours a. week, pedagogy, his- 
tory and geography two hours. In their fourth year, 
the practical term, the candidates study pedagogy and 
methods of teaching seven hours, eight hours a week 



THE GERMANS AT SCHOOL 207 

thesis writing, six hours training in practical class work 
and six hours training in the practical methods of the 
various subjects, including laboratory experiments. In 
addition to all this, through the four years there are 
three hours of gymnastics, two hours of drawing and 
one hour of singing. For the friends of women's 
progress, however, the chief accent of the system lies 
on the Studienanstalt. It is a school of six classes de- 
manding six years' work open to those who have 
passed the first seven classes of the higher girls' schools. 
The three highest classes of the girls' school are then 
skipped, and instead of them the six years' course under- 
taken. This, however, is again divided into three sep- 
arate schools corresponding to the Gymnasium, the 
Realgymnasium and the Oberrealschule of the boys. 
In the Gymnasium course during those six years the 
girls have three hours a week German, six hours a week 
Latin, at first three, later two hours French, in the first 
two classes three hours a week English, in the last four 
classes eight hours a week Greek. Through all the 
years there is history two hours, mathematics first four, 
later two hours, religion two, geography one, gymnas- 
tics three and drawing three. In the Realgymnasium 
the girls have no Greek whatever, but throughout six 
hours Latin, three hours French, three hours English 
and somewhat more mathematics and natural science 
than in the Gymnasium course. Finally in the Ober- 



208 THE GERMANS AT SCHOOL 

realschule Latin too is omitted while both French and 
English are increased to four hours a week, mathe- 
matics to five, natural science to four and German also 
to four. This new plan adapts itself most successfully 
to the various needs, and the only danger lies in the 
fact that inasmuch as these three last types of schools 
open wide the way to the professional studies of the 
universities the number of academically trained women 
may soon by far surpass the demand of the community. 
This vivid activity in the direction of liberal changes 
through governmental initiative does not exclude an 
abundance of efforts to break new educational paths. 
For instance much interest is centered nowadays on the 
so-called reform schools. They aim toward postpon- 
ing the decision for a particular type of school as late 
as possible. The usual schools are different from the 
start. The classical schools begin with their Latin in 
the lowest classes. The reform school systems, of 
which the model was the city school system of Frank- 
fort, have a common foundation for all schools, remind- 
ing one in this respect of the American principle. The 
much discussed Frankfort plan in the first three classes 
gives to all the pupils in common five hours German, 
six hours French, two hours geography, five hours math- 
ematics, two hours of natural science, two hours of 
writing, three to two hours of religion, three hours 
of gymnastics, two hours of drawing and two hours of 



THE GERMANS AT SCHOOL 209 

singing. Only with the fourth class does the bifurca- 
tion begin. In the classical course the fourth class be- 
gins at once with ten hours Latin and the sixth class 
with eight hours of Greek, while in the realistic course 
the Latin is started in the fourth class, with eight hours 
going down to six, and the English begins in the sixth 
class with six hours. There is still much distrust of 
this apparently very reasonable procedure. Everyone 
feels that the momentous decision of the character of 
the education ought to be made at an age when the 
individual differences show more clearly than in the 
first years of school life, but the friends of the tradi- 
tional Gymnasium are still convinced that a thorough 
classical training in accordance with the old German 
ideals ought to shape the mind of the youth in the char- 
acteristic way from a tender age. There the German 
school men still stand in the midst of passionate discus- 
sions. 

But the intense pedagogical forward movement of 
the German people must not be studied only in the pro- 
grammes of the official schools. After all they repre- 
sent the conservative aspect. The most progressive 
changes which would upset the traditions altogether 
are expressed in private institutions, usually the crea- 
tions of enthusiastic idealists. They feel that there is 
a deep-lying antagonism between the claims of the of- 
ficial school and hundreds of thousands of hopes. Un- 



210 THE GERMANS AT SCHOOL 

doubtedly a large part of the nation is convinced that 
the whole school system is antiquated and too little ad- 
justed to the needs of the new Germany. The schools 
still carry with them too much of that Germany which 
lived and thought but which was politically powerless 
and in the practical world helpless. The new German 
who does not look into the clouds but prefers to stand 
with both feet firm on the ground wants knowledge of 
natural science instead of languages, wants develop- 
ment toward national patriotism instead of religion in 
school, and wants civics instead of archeology. The 
center of it all is the firm demand that the youth be 
prepared for the national life with its social demands 
and its realistic energies. The character is to be de- 
veloped still more than the intellect, and the mind is to 
be schooled for a time which overstrains a man unless 
he is trained for concentration. Of course much super- 
ficiality and pedagogical amateurishness are in play 
there. Especially the educational value of the natural 
sciences is still a very doubtful claim in the eyes of 
those who have really watched the outcome. But in 
this point too the serious reformers propose a funda- 
mental change. They say that natural sciences are 
indeed without fundamental significance for the mind 
of the youth if the instruction means only a heaping up 
of information. In these days of rapid naturalistic 
progress the temptation is always great to bring the 



THE GERMANS AT SCHOOL 211 

boy in contact with as many fields of positive knowl- 
edge as possible. But there is too much kaleidoscopic 
unrest in this superficial excitement of the intellect to 
bring any lasting gain. The new leaders therefore 
wish that knowledge be considered as unimportant and 
that the mastery of method and of naturalistic thinking 
alone be emphasized. The boys are to learn how to 
learn from nature. And in a corresponding way these 
groups of reformers wish to change the teaching of 
history. The children are not to learn the facts but 
the methods to find out the true facts from various 
sources. They are to be brought into contact with the 
old reports by which the events of the past are trans- 
mitted. The knowledge of the languages ought to be 
gained by practice in conversation, the knowledge of 
the earth by wandering and living in nature. 

This is typically combined in the much-admired in- 
stitutions of Dr. Lietz, the so-called Landerziehungs- 
heime, educational homes in the country. Lietz is 
a young enthusiastic teacher who was stirred by the 
ideal of building up healthy, strong, joyful, energetic 
and judicial men who would be in sympathy with their 
fellow creatures and understand the needs of the com- 
mon people, and yet who would be inspired by art and 
science and technique. He has created in the loveliest 
regions of Germany three national schools, for the 
youngest children between seven and twelve in Ilsen- 



212 THE GERMANS AT SCHOOL 

i 

burg in the Hartz, the second in Haubinda in Thuringia 

for the boys between twelve and fifteen and the third 
in the castle of Bieberstein in the Rhon Mountains for 
boys between sixteen and twenty. All three places are 
far removed from the turmoil of the world, and the 
boys find there a most harmonious interconnection of in- 
tellectual training, handicraft work, agricultural activity, 
sport and inspiring social intercourse between teachers 
and pupils. It is a delight to see those happy young- 
sters under conditions in which their natural instincts 
for out-of-door life and for social companionship, for 
manual activity and for sport, are so wholesomely satis- 
fied and at the same time where their intellectual de- 
velopment is secured by individualizing training in 
scholarly method. They learn really to love the litera- 
ture and the history of their country and to become per- 
sonally interested in the political and the economic 
structure of their nation. Their minds are opened to 
music and art, to religion and morality. Small groups 
of them undertake walking trips not only into the near 
neighborhood, but to far-distant parts of the fatherland 
in a simple camping style. Sometimes even long 
journeys to Egypt and elsewhere have been undertaken 
in the vacation time. Truly it is an ideal method to 
develop a healthy mind in a healthy body. Whether 
it will become the crystallization point for general edu- 
cational changes in Germany is, however, more than 



THE GERMANS AT SCHOOL 213 

doubtful. So far these reforms are in an uphill fight. 
They suffer from that which they feel as an unfair- 
ness, namely, from the fact that their schools must lead 
the boys to the same examinations which the regular 
school boys have to pass if the pupils are to go on to 
the university or to any other official career. This de- 
mands that in the last years much cramming be intro- 
duced and that features be forced on these new boy 
paradises which seem very foreign to their spirit. They 
demand, accordingly, new regulations which will give 
to the new types of schools more appropriate examina- 
tions as end points. As long as this is not granted, 
these schools remain confined to narrow circles. But 
more important perhaps is the second fact. The Ger- 
mans feel on the whole very unwilling to give their sons 
and daughters out of the house, if the education can 
possibly be obtained in the neighborhood. The system 
of the American academies and boarding schools is con- 
trary to all German traditions. Especially in the large 
cities in which the Americans are most readily inclined 
to send their children away for the educational years, 
the Germans would least think of separating the youth 
from the home. 

It may seem surprising to American observers that 
in the abundance of educational schemes which recent 
times have ripened in Germany nowhere has a serious 
movement toward coeducation been started. In a very 



2i 4 THE GERMANS AT SCHOOL 

modest way it has been forced on the communities in 
those places in which girls want to be prepared for the 
university but where no special Gymnasium classes for 
girls have been arranged. Just these exceptional cases 
however hasten the establishment of special Gymna- 
siums for women. The German community is decidedly 
unwilling to gather in one schoolroom boys and girls 
beyond the age of the elementary school. They do 
not object to the coeducational instruction of small chil- 
dren in rural schools. This is a frequent practice. 
Nor do they object to the comradeship of young men 
and women on the level of the highest university work. 
But in the broad period of the development of adoles- 
cence they believe in strict bieducation. Even when 
the material of study is the same, differentiation of 
method is demanded and German pedagogues decidedly 
object to women teachers for grown-up boys. The 
fact is that the new girls' school plans, even where they 
lead to exactly the same goal as the Gymnasium or the 
Realschule, distribute the material in a characteristically 
different way from the programme of the boys' schools. 
They acknowledge the psychological laws of the dif- 
ferent rhythm of the development of the two sexes. 
The well-known suggestion that the boys become refined 
and the girls strengthened through the presence of the 
other sex is the more powerless, since the educators feel 
justified in reporting that even America, where the ex- 



THE GERMANS AT SCHOOL 215 

periment has been tried most extensively, is in a stage 
of reaction against the coeducational enthusiasm. 

Whoever looks at the free play of educational ener- 
gies in Germany's social organism is probably most im- 
pressed by the strong activity outside of the regular day 
schools. Instruction for those who go to school be- 
cause they have not yet entered a practical life work is 
furnished everywhere in the world, but no country 
shows such systematic educational planning for those who 
have left school and are at work in business or in factor- 
ies, in agriculture or in any other calling. The splendid 
development which this type of pedagogical influence has 
found in recent times has been to a high degree due to 
a reaction against grave misuses in the past. In early 
times, to be sure, the boy who left the primary school 
was under the strict control of the master in the work- 
shop or in the business. But the nineteenth century 
changed those paternalizing conditions and brought 
complete freedom. The result was a steadily grow- 
ing insubordination and obstinacy, frivolous breaches 
of contracts and unreliability, together with a craving 
for enjoyment on the moral side, and a lack of careful 
training on the professional side. The community felt 
this inability to get hold of the boys who had left 
school as one of the most serious national dangers. 
In response to this need the continuation schools were 
founded which are to develop the youth after the 



216 THE GERMANS AT SCHOOL 

school years in moral, practical and intellectual re- 
spects. The essential difference from all other schools 
lies of course in the fact that these take only a fraction 
of the boy's time in order not to interfere with his 
work. But they receive their real social background 
from the legal obligation of the employer to give every 
boy the opportunity to attend these school classes. 
Compared with the general elementary school, the con- 
tinuation school is professional, while the other is a 
humanistic school. On the other hand, compared with 
the real technical schools both lower and higher, it 
combines the technical instruction with general educa- 
tion. But, above all, the technical schools demand for 
some years the whole working time of the pupils, while 
the continuation schools are only supplementary to the 
chief business of the boy. The technical schools, such 
as for instance all the agricultural schools or the special 
industrial schools or the commercial schools, are strictly 
professional; the continuation schools are essentially 
educational. It may be said that even the technical 
element in them becomes subordinated to the aim of 
making a whole man and not only a skillful worker out 
of the boy who has left the school in his fourteenth 
year. The principle of this continuation school has 
conquered all Germany, but the realization of it looks 
very different in the various parts of the country. In 
some, the communities are forced by law to establish 



THE GERMANS AT SCHOOL 217 

such schools, in other parts the towns are free to ar- 
range them according to the local needs. On the 
whole this difference seems less important, as the con- 
tinuation schools are flourishing wonderfully in some 
parts in which the laws give large freedom in the mat- 
ter to the community. The point about which the dis- 
cussion at present seems much more excited is the ques- 
tion whether the schoolteacher or the man of practical 
life, the master in the arts and crafts, the business man, 
the farmer, the industrial specialist, is to be the de- 
cisive factor. The men of the workshop complain that 
these schools become worthless as soon as the methods 
and the points of view of the schoolteacher control 
them, and the opposite party believes that the highest 
value is missed if the spirit of the factory and not that 
of the schoolroom enters into them. 

As the continuation schools were to serve the needs 
of young people in many different walks of practical 
life, the schools themselves had to develop an almost 
unlimited manifoldness. A subtle adjustment to the 
local conditions as well as to the varieties of industry 
and trade had to be aimed at. Continuation schools 
for candy makers and continuation schools for shoe 
makers had to be different. There are five chief types : 
the general continuation school, the commercial, the in- 
dustrial, the rural and, exclusively for girls, the house- 
hold economy school. Each of these types is realized 



218 THE GERMANS AT SCHOOL 

sometimes in schools of obligatory character, and some- 
times in schools where the attendance is voluntary, as 
well as in schools with prescribed courses, and in others 
with great freedom of election. The most famous sys- 
tem of continuation schools, the discussion of which has 
had most valuable influence on the whole German 
situation, is that of the city of Munich, where the inde- 
fatigable superintendent of schools, Dr. Kerschen- 
steiner, has succeeded in a perfect adjustment of edu- 
cational needs to the practical requirements of the 
community. Particularly his industrial continuation 
schools have been organized in such a way that almost 
every important business is represented by special classes 
for apprentices and special classes for journeymen and 
older working men. There are classes for chimney 
sweepers and for cabinetmakers, for coachmen and for 
ivory carvers, for watchmakers and for photographers, 
for tailors and for locksmiths, for barbers and for gar- 
deners, for office boys and for waiters. There are al- 
together two hundred and ninety-six classes for the first 
years and one hundred and thirteen classes for those 
who are beyond the years of apprenticeship. About 
ten thousand boys are regularly attending. Every 
class has a careful programme in which elements of gen- 
eral human education, elements of technical theoretical 
information and technical practical training, and finally 
elements of civic and sociological instruction, are har- 



THE GERMANS AT SCHOOL 219 

moniously combined. This blending of different fac- 
tors shows itself in the appointment of teachers. In 
the two hundred and ninety-six classes for the younger 
boys, for instance, we find seventy-seven general and 
thirty-seven technical teachers who devote to the work 
all their time and two hundred and twenty-one elemen- 
tary-school teachers and one hundred and eleven tech- 
nical and professional teachers who give instruction in 
their specialties as a side function, and one hundred and 
sixty teachers of religion. The essential point for an 
American spectator is, however, that the instruction for 
those thousands of young people in the midst of their 
practical life is given in the best hours of the day, 
either in the morning or in the afternoon, and that the 
employers are obliged to give them the opportunity to 
attend from six to ten hours a week for four years. 
Obligatory instruction in the evening when the young 
people come fatigued from their daily labor is excluded 
by the scheme. There is perhaps at present in the sys- 
tem of German school work no feature which so much 
deserves the attention of the American reformer as 
this whole plan of continuation schools as developed in 
the city of Munich and as more or less similarly or- 
ganized in a large number of German cities. 

Yet after spending a year in the educational atmos- 
phere of Germany, if I think over what is the essential 
element which I should like to bring to our school work 



220 THE GERMANS AT SCHOOL 

here, I doubt whether any special institution or special 
scheme ought to be mentioned. Different social con- 
ditions demand different educational plans, and on both 
sides the times are favorable for the elaboration and 
organization of that of which the nation at school is in 
need. While German education is favored by its tra- 
ditions and by the thoroughness of the governmental 
administration, American education is no less favored 
by the wealth of the people which allows not only ex- 
cellent equipment, but which above all permits the 
youth to remain in the schoolroom through more years 
than other nations can afford. But while America will 
surely take care of every detail, and develops and will 
develop more and more educational features which may 
truly be models for Europe, I feel the real difference — 
and not as a son of Germany, but as a teacher of 
American sons, I should rather say — the real defect 
here in the spirit which moves this educational ma- 
chinery and in the attitude which is taken toward the 
intellectual material. The American nation is full of 
enthusiasm for education, believes thoroughly in the 
dissemination of knowledge and in the importance of 
education for citizenship, and the educational circles 
themselves are rapturously eager for the improvement 
of the educational schemes. All this is excellent and 
admirable, and yet it cannot reach the ideal aim and 
cannot perform the wonderful miracle. This educa- 



THE GERMANS AT SCHOOL 221 

tional eagerness after all refers to externalities, but 
what is needed still more is the spirit of belief in the 
value of knowledge. For the typical American the 
knowledge or the training implanted is something which 
draws its value from its importance for a certain ex- 
amination or a certain degree or a certain possibility to 
reach through it something else. This is as true of 
the student in college as of the child in the elementary 
school and in spite of its many exceptions of the aver- 
age college professor. One of the greatest European 
scientists on returning home from an exchange year at 
an American university condensed his impressions into 
the remark that he had never heard from university 
colleagues so much talking about education and so little 
about scholarly problems. The average student reads 
just as many pages in his textbook as are prescribed 
for his college course, but he lacks the impulse to make 
adventurous excursions into regions which no teacher 
has shown to him. In this way the American student 
may even read more than the average German student, 
because his daily routine work is better supervised. 
Yet among the German students are more individuals 
who are glowing with the desire to know, who on their 
own resources plunge into passionate research and who 
spend wonderful nights in excited debates with their 
chums on purely theoretical problems. And exactly 
this spirit goes down to the lowest schools and goes up 



222 THE GERMANS AT SCHOOL 

to the highest. This fundamental difference is hardly 
felt by one who stands in the midst of the daily routine 
work and is doing his share in the gigantic mill of 
American education, but whenever a man spends a while 
among the German schools, high or low, and then 
comes back, a period of readjustment is necessary in 
which he vividly feels the contrast and in which he can- 
not help thinking that after all the crown of real in- 
tellectual mastership will come to this nation only if 
something of that foreign spirit and belief penetrates 
its educational atmosphere. 



PSYCHOLOGY AND THE NAVY 



This essay first appeared in the North American Review 



PSYCHOLOGY AND THE NAVY 1 

FOR the first general address of your naval course 
you have invited a man who has never stepped on 
the deck of a warship except to attend some jolly after- 
noon tea or a dance or a luncheon, when the guns were 
decorated with flowers. Of course this means that 
your guest, while deeply honored by the generosity of 
your request, cannot dare to contribute even the least 
word of information or knowledge to the study of those 
technical, strategical and practical problems which have 
drawn you to these famous halls. But it seems to me 
that your willingness to step so far outside of your vo- 
cational circle and to admit a psychologist to your coun- 
cil indicates a new and significant attitude toward your 
work and your duties. And this attitude may appear 
surprising to not a few. The world is full of the glory 
of the development of modern battleships, full of ad- 
miration for the tremendous material values which they 
represent and for the technical triumphs which are 
achieved by the perfection of their guns and machinery. 
The world of newspaper readers is hypnotized by the 

1 An address delivered before the officers of the United States Naval 
War College at Newport, R. I., June 5, 1912. 

225 



226 PSYCHOLOGY AND THE NAVE 

stupendous possibilities which the dreadnaughts of our 
day have created and its imagination is excited by the 
improvements and inventions, by the torpedoes and the 
submarines and the turrets which make the naval battle 
of the future the most gigantic technical problem of the 
age. But in the midst of this unquestioning enthusiasm 
for the material development and the physical 
progress of the battleship, you stand for the conviction 
that it is after all the man, man's thought, and man's 
emotion and man's will which is of decisive importance. 
You do not submit to the popular prejudice which ex- 
pects success only from the marvels of steel and powder 
and electricity. You have learned too well the great 
lesson of history which demonstrates that throughout 
four thousand years the victory has been with the ships 
of those who were fit to win. It is not true that fate 
has been with the heavy guns ; it has always been with 
the great minds. The knowledge of the ships and the 
armament becomes a living power only if it is em- 
bedded in the understanding of strategics and grand 
tactics, and they would be empty if the psyche of man 
were not acknowledged as their center. With this 
background of feelings you have turned to psychology 
to inquire whether the study of the mind may be made 
serviceable to the navy in peace or in war. 

The psychologist of a few years ago would have felt 
embarrassed if men of that great world in which guns 



PSYCHOLOGY AND THE NAVY 227 

arc pointed and battles fought should have come as in- 
truders into his quiet laboratory rooms where he was 
carrying on his patient researches into the traits and 
the mechanism of the human mind. His science had 
grown up far from the turmoil of the world of clashing 
interests in the repose and quietude of pure academic 
life. Psychologists studied consciousness, its laws and 
its surprising developments with all the means of exact 
modern methods, but never with a thought of dragging 
the results into the marketplaces and of making prac- 
tical use of that which was sought for knowledge' sake 
only. But the last few years have brought a radical 
change. The treasures of knowledge which were 
heaped up in the storehouses of the modern psychol- 
ogist have at last been coined and made serviceable to 
the demands of the day. The psychologists began to 
aid the efforts of the schoolteachers who had too long 
forgotten that the human mind of the pupil is the only 
important element in the school ; they began to help the 
physicians who had too long neglected the fundamental 
role which the mind plays in the health and disease of 
the patient; they began to aid the lawyer and the judge 
who had too long dealt with crime without analyzing 
the criminal's mind; they even began to aid the mer- 
chant and the captain of industry whose customers and 
whose laborers are minds which may be studied witK 
profit from the point of view of psychological science. 



228 PSYCHOLOGY AND THE NAVY 

They have served the social reformer and the voca- 
tional counselor, even the artist and the minister; in 
short, they have in recent years developed an applied 
psychology which stands to the theoretical work of our 
laboratories as the science of the engineer stands to 
physics or chemistry. It is a psychotechnical science 
which cannot acknowledge barriers where the human 
mind is working in the interplay of social energies. 
Commanding a ship or fulfilling the orders of the com- 
mander, shaping the plans of a battle or pointing the 
gun, directing a submarine or aiming a torpedo, send- 
ing the wireless message or even feeding the engines in 
the hold of the ship while the cannons are thundering, is 
an activity of the mind, and it is not only the right but 
the duty of the psychologist to consider conscientiously 
whether his science may not be applied in this realm of 
human efficiency too. 

The problems which might most naturally suggest 
themselves at the very threshold are those which are 
common to the seafaring world independent of whether 
the ship is to fight or peacefully to carry passengers and 
freight from shore to shore, the problems of naviga- 
tion. We ought not to overlook the fact that certain 
elements of exact psychology indeed entered the naval 
service quite a number of years ago. I refer to the 
study of colorblindness. No one has a right to become 
a seaman who is unable to discriminate the color signals 



PSYCHOLOGY AND THE NAVY 229 

of the passing ships, but these facts of colorblindness 
which are to-day such a matter of course in the naval 
world had to be slowly examined by psychological stud- 
ies, and the tests by which these abnormities of 
the human eye are traced are still being steadily elabo- 
rated in the workshops of the psychologists. Even in 
this apparently wellknown little field, the psychologist 
goes on discovering new phenomena. Many types of 
color weakness and color deficiency can be traced to- 
day which a few years ago would still have escaped the 
notice of the experimenter and the more intimately the 
naval service remains in contact with the progress of 
these sense studies by introducing the newest subtle 
methods of testing, the greater the chance of elimina- 
ting mistakes which might spell disaster. I am in- 
clined to believe that variations and deficiencies of hear- 
ing, well known to the psychologist, may be of a certain 
significance too in the problems of navigation. Only 
in recent years has a careful psychological study been 
devoted to the mental conditions of the localization of 
sound. How far is the cooperation of the two ears 
necessary in order to determine exactly the direction, 
and what angles of deviation can be discerned and what 
directions of sound may be confused with one another? 
No one of these laboratory studies was undertaken with 
practical purposes in view, and yet it seems probable 
that the officer who is to determine the direction of the 



2 3 o PSYCHOLOGY AND THE NAVY 

foghorn's sound would profit from an acquaintance 
with such psychological investigations, and that psycho- 
logical tests might eliminate many a man from the list 
of those who are considered competent to judge the 
sounds in a fog. The new duty of listening to the 
submarine bells involves other acoustical functions 
which may also make psychological inquiries advisable. 
But the mental analysis would trace strong individual 
differences with regard to many other features that 
might mean good or evil for the profession of the navi- 
gator. The officer on the bridge is in a very different 
position according to whether his mental imagery is 
of the visual or of the motor-acoustical type. The 
one may carry in consciousness a vivid picture of the 
map of the shore with its lighthouses and signals while 
the other may possess his knowledge in the form of 
words and figures. Both may know the same data, 
and each kind of knowledge has its particular advan- 
tages for certain purposes but the two minds take an 
entirely different attitude toward the channel through 
which they have to pass, and the difference may be 
momentous. Still more important are the psycholog- 
ical differences in the ability of men to observe distant 
objects and to keep a faithful memory of a series of 
events to which the attention has been turned. The 
absurd contradictions in the reports of witnesses before 
the court provoked the psychological study of the abil- 



PSYCHOLOGY AND THE NAVY 231 

ity for giving testimony. Thousands of experiments 
have been devoted to the question under the exact con- 
ditions of the laboratory experiment. We know now 
how misleading the reports of the most sincere wit- 
nesses may be, how illusions may slip in in spite of the 
most serious intentions, how the subjective feeling of 
certainty may deceive us point for point, and above all 
how great the individual differences are in the faithful- 
ness of mental reports. The sea serpent stories of all 
regions have indicated how the sea is the most favor- 
able background for the illusions of mental perception. 
We know from recent studies that for instance a quick 
succession of similar impressions produces a mutual in- 
hibition through which some are eliminated from the 
range of our attention. The psychologist has found 
many such subtle traits of our attention which interfere 
with our observations and if we think how much de- 
pends upon the observation of the naval officer on the 
commercial ship as well as on the man of war we can 
foresee that the time must come when the studies of 
the psychologist will not be ignored in the navy. 
Moreover we find by experimental inquiry that the 
power of observation is dependent upon individual fea- 
tures and that accordingly one man may be excellent in 
one kind of observation and entirely unreliable in an- 
other kind in spite of his personal feeling that he is ex- 
erting an equal effort. These individual differences 



2 3 2 PSYCHOLOGY AND THE NAVY 

must be tested in order to find which man is particularly 
fit for a certain kind of observation and whose judg- 
ment is unreliable. Similar psychological tests would 
be advisable for the spotter on the mast and for the 
men in many another position. 

To illustrate these possibilities of psychological tests 
which may be applied in the interest of navigation I 
may characterize at least one a little more in detail. 
The officer on the bridge may know exactly what he has 
to do under normal conditions and may be perfectly 
able to figure out carefully the right decision in case of 
an unusual, unexpected, complex situation if he has 
plenty of time to judge on the relative value of the 
various factors involved. But the ultimate proof of 
the man comes when the unexpected happens and no 
time is left for the slow decision. A quick decision 
must be made or destruction of ship or life will follow. 
A vessel or a rock or a wreck may suddenly loom up 
in the midst, and a collision is inevitable unless the right 
actions are quickly chosen, and this means unless rapidly 
and yet correctly the comparative importance and in- 
fluence of the conditions is grasped. Only the man 
who can live up to this demand of an emergency is the 
born leader of a ship, as far as mere navigation is con- 
cerned. Experience for which mankind has dearly 
paid has shown that there are two types of men who 
utterly fail. One type becomes paralyzed under the 



PSYCHOLOGY AND THE NAVY 233 

pressure of the sudden responsibility. The feeling that 
a decision must be quickly reached inhibits in him every 
impulse to action, his mind comes to a standstill. Be- 
fore he reaches any decision at all the chances are gone, 
and the disaster can no longer be averted. The other 
type instantly opens the channels of motor discharge but 
the flood of impulses rushes into any chance course and 
a haphazard result, a foolish decision or an unconsid- 
ered hasty action is the outcome. The right man is of 
the third type which under the pressure of danger with- 
out loss of time instinctively grasps the whole complex 
situation, is not carried away by any chance impression, 
does not overlook what is significant in the unexpected 
event, sees the important things great and the insig- 
nificant small. Coolly he chooses in immediate re- 
sponse the attitude which he would take if he had time 
for careful deliberation. Are we to wait until an emer- 
gency arises to find out whether the right type of person- 
ality is in command? May not the penalty of this post- 
ponement be measureless loss of valuable lives? A 
leading ship company raised this neglected question re- 
cently with great earnestness and invited me as psycholo- 
gist to consider whether our laboratory could not devise 
a scheme by which this ability to judge rapidly and yet 
correctly could be tested and measured. I tried many 
schemes — at first very complicated ones, but slowly 
I settled on an extremely simple device which brings 



234 PSYCHOLOGY AND THE NAVY 

out with surprising clearness the mental differences 
and the variations of those three types of behaviour. 
The device looks like a little game. I use twenty-four 
cards each of which contains four rows of twelve capi- 
tal letters. They are all A's, E's, O's and IPs. Some 
of the cards contain twenty-one of one of the four let- 
ters and nine each of the three others, some contain 
eighteen of the one and ten each of the others and some 
fifteen of the one and eleven each of the three others. 
The letters are in an entirely irregular order and every 
card at the first glance looks almost bewildering. The 
task of the man to be tested is to stare at one card and 
to decide as quickly as possible which of the four letters 
is the most frequent one. It is evident that this is much 
more difficult if the most frequent letter occurs only 
fifteen times than when it occurs twenty-one times, but 
even in the latter case it is not easy to do it without any 
help by counting for which of course no time is allowed. 
The full experiment consists in making this decision as 
quickly as possible for every one of the twenty-four 
cards, and the objective test is made by the demand that 
the subject of the experiment arrange the cards with 
the greatest possible speed in four piles, in the first 
those in which the A is predominant, in the second the 
E, in the third the O and in the fourth the U. Then 
we measure the time from the signal to begin to the 
moment of laying down the last card and afterward we 



PSYCHOLOGY AND THE NAVY 235 

count the number of times a card has been put into the 
wrong pile. Through a test which takes only a few 
minutes we thus arrive at a sorting of men according 
to their quickness or sluggishness, deliberateness or in- 
ability to make a prompt decision. It is surprising how 
often men tested with this simple device confess that 
the result expresses exactly the experience which they 
have passed through when life called them to a sudden 
decision in an unexpected complex situation. Never- 
theless I am far from saying that the ideal of a test for 
this particular demand has been reached in this propo- 
sition. Still more suitable schemes may be invented in 
the future, but at least we no longer have any right to 
ignore the problem and to disregard the possibilities 
which experimental psychology offers and to wait until 
the events of life carry on the experiments with disas- 
trous results. Yet for us here I have discussed this 
particular case only as an illustration of the method 
by which the experimental psychologist with his minia- 
ture repetitions of life tasks may seek the right man for 
the right place, even on the bridge of the shio or in 
the crow's nest or in the engine room. 

The officer in the navy, however, does not think pri- 
marily of those psychological features which are as im- 
portant for the ocean greyhounds of the commercial 
fleet as for his ironclad floating fortresses. His inter- 
est naturally turns to those traits of the mind which 



2 3 6 PSYCHOLOGY AND THE NAVY 

are more directly connected with the success or failure 
in warfare. Hence let us consider that wide region of 
higher mental activities, the interplay of emotion and 
volition, judgment and imagination, intellect and in- 
stinct. But then we do best in our survey to discrim- 
inate between the minds of the officers and those of the 
crew. What are the mental characteristics of the many 
to whom the few have to give their orders? One 
psychological fact ought to stand in the foreground and 
ought never to be forgotten. The many are not sim- 
ply a large number of single minds; they are not only 
many, but they are at the same time one. They are 
held together — more, they are forged together into 
one compact mental mass in which no single mind which 
entered has remained unchanged in its structure or in 
its energies. Let us by no means believe that this is 
only a metaphor or a picturesque expression which is 
to symbolize the fact that those hundreds of men have 
certain ideas or desires or emotions or feelings or preju- 
dices or hopes or fears in common and that the superior 
may simply rely on these common factors and accord- 
ingly ignore the individual differences among the men. 
Their unity is not a simple uniformity; their minds are 
interrelated and not simply added to one another. Yet 
we must keep just as far from any reminiscences of pop- 
ular mystical ideas, as if by a kind of telepathy one 
mind reached out to another and fused with it in a 



PSYCHOLOGY AND THE NAVY 237 

spiritual communion. Seen from a psychological 
standpoint the personality is completely confined to the 
impressions, memories, imaginations, emotions and vo- 
litions which originate in its own compass and no mind 
can intrude into this closed individuality. What- 
ever comes to the individual mind from without 
must come through the senses in the form of im- 
pressions and sense perceptions. But when those im- 
pressions are perceptions not of the dead things around 
us but of living beings animated by interests like ours 
and engaged in action with us, the impression influences 
the whole setting of the mind in one characteristic di- 
rection. The psychologist characterizes this as an in- 
crease of suggestibility. The particular man becomes 
more suggestible to all propositions which his senses 
receive from his companions. This psychophysical in- 
crease of suggestibility transforms the individuals now 
into a crowd, now into a rushing mob, now into an en- 
thusiastic army, and whoever deals with such a group 
of men in which everyone knows himself as a part of 
the cooperating whole must be fully aware of the ad- 
vantages and of the dangers which are created by this 
reenforcement of suggestibility. 

Suggestibility in the view of the modern psychologist 
means the readiness to accept suggestions, and sugges- 
tions are never anything but propositions for actions. 
In ordinary talk we speak of suggestions of ideas, but 



23 S PSYCHOLOGY AND THE NAVY 

ira a stricter sense this is misleading. X:: the idea it- 
self becomes the cb;ecc :: the suggestion but either the 
preposition t: act according to a certain idea or the 
proposition to believe in the reality of a certain idea. 
I: vre suggest the idea of a flower garden to a hypno- 
tized ntan within the walls of his room, we d: not sim- 
ply awake the imaginative idea before his mind. We 
might awake such an imaginative picture c: a garden in 
any normal mind by speaking about it without hypno- 
tism and without suggestion. What characterizes the 
abnormal state of the hypnotized is that he is ready to 
accept the proposition that such a garden really sur- 
rounds him, and accordingly he begins to pick the roses 
from his chairs and tables. He accepts those ideas as 
real, and this is indeed ultimately nothing but an ami- 
rude and his action an acticn of submission and ci ac- 
knowledgment. Ah suggestions refer In this way to 
the inner cr outer d:ings of men. Vow ordinarily if 
we propose an acti:n to our neighbrr, the idea of the 
puroose mav Interest him and ir no ob'ections arise m 

tude or activity*. But it may just as well happen that 

cur proposition awakes in his mind the idea that the 

-... ;;iT -^- i; ci doe acticn would be disagreeable or 



L-_. 



even 






PSYCHOLOGY AND THE NAVY 239 

that a risk would be connected with it or that it would 
be against the rules, and anyone of these associated 
ideas might overcome the impulse to carry out the prop- 
osition. He refuses to do what we invited him to un- 
dertake because the opposing idea proves to be the 
stronger. But the idea of an action may be proposed 
to us with such vividness and warmth, with such a strik- 
ing tone of authority or with such insistent persuasive- 
ness that all those resisting associations are suppressed 
and inhibited. The inner opposition is overwhelmed, 
the proposed action is carried out, and in the case that 
a proposition has such a power to inhibit the opposing 
ideas, we call it suggestion. But this effect may result 
not only from the impressiveness and persuasiveness; it 
may result and does result still oftener from an inner 
state of the man. He may have come into a readiness 
to yield to propositions which he would otherwise re- 
sist, to perform acts which would normally appear to 
him silly or dangerous. This inner change is the in- 
crease of suggestibility. Emotional excitement, over- 
fatigue, certain drugs, produce this change. If the 
change reaches its maximum degree, we call it hypnosis, 
as the hypnotic state is indeed nothing but highly in- 
creased suggestibility. But with normal men there is 
no more effective cause for the increase of suggestibility 
than the forming of a mass in which everyone sees and 
knows that all the others share his fate, have the same 



2 4 o PSYCHOLOGY AND THE NAVY 

to perform and to enjoy and to suffer. The children 
in a class, the laborers in a factory, the voters in a 
mass meeting, the spectators on the bleachers at a game, 
the crowd assembled at a fire or an accident, form vari- 
ous types of such organized units held together by in- 
creased suggestibility through which every single mem- 
ber is liable to act in a way which would be unnatural 
to him if he were alone. He may do acts or say things 
or risk dangers which he would fear if he stood by him- 
self. He has not really become more courageous but 
his increased suggestibility makes him imitative and 
ready to do what the others seem willing to do and to 
ignore the warning voice of his reason or his cowardice. 
He also becomes a little more foolish than he would be 
in isolation, he may shout words or indulge in actions 
which would appear to him silly or inconsiderate if he 
were alone, but the crowd consciousness has control of 
him ; he has become insensitive to the opposing voice of 
wisdom. He laughs where he would never laugh 
alone, he runs away where his normal instincts would 
teach him to hold on, he gets discouraged or excited 
where the cold facts would not warrant either. The 
mass can hold his mind down to a level far below its 
true nature and can lift it up to a height which it could 
never reach unsupported. 

Among all lasting conditions of human life no one 
seems more predisposed to create this increased sug- 



PSYCHOLOGY AND THE NAVY 241 

gestibility of a mass than the life on a warship. Every 
man on board feels how his fate is bound up with that 
of all the others. He knows that they all are detached 
for months and years from the life of the millions, they 
feel the same pulse of the engines, they are lifted by 
the same waves, they know that the same danger would 
threaten all of them. The individual has given up a 
part of his possibilities. If the hour of a battle were 
to come, every man knows that for him no individual 
rushing forward is possible as for the soldiers on the 
battlefield. He cannot escape the ship which carries 
them all and with which they all will sink if it goes to 
the bottom. A closer union of a multitude of strangers 
cannot be imagined; the suggestibility must therefore 
be tremendously increased and that means that the pow- 
ers of the man are reenforced for good or for evil, that 
his individual resistance to the imitative impulses is de- 
creased and that he has become to a certain degree a 
passive instrument for the will of the leader. No su- 
perior can fail to make the fullest use of this power and 
to be aware of the lurking dangers. He must know 
that this increased suggestibility could be the condition 
for a panic among men no single one of whom would 
be frightened. But at the same time he can rely on it 
that this suggestibility would insure an enthusiastic and 
heroic fight, if the right impulse and the right start are 
given, and that every single man may then be carried 



242 PSYCHOLOGY AND THE NAVY 

far beyond the range of his individual spontaneity. As 
to the technical side of this control of the mass, one rule 
may be immediately deduced from these psychological 
principles. If crowd consciousness is really only in- 
creased suggestibility, and suggestibility is only readi- 
ness to act according to a proposition, it will be of utmost 
importance to give the signal for any turn of mind by 
an impulse to real action. Do not try to awake any 
ideas or conceptions or judgments but release an action 
in the right direction by forcing any one man to carry 
it out or better still by making the movement yourself, 
and you have won your case. One forward movement 
bears the whole mass forward, one backward movement 
ruins all. Even if you only go through the motions of 
an action to give an illusory suggestion of it which would 
not convince the individual, it will carry away the ex- 
cited mass. 

This suggestibility of the social group which com- 
poses the crew stands in an especially significant relation 
to the mental function which after all is the backbone 
of military service, obedience. Where the spirit of 
discipline is lacking, the military cause is lost. There 
never has been a victorious navy without obedience. 
To a certain degree the necessity of a dogged submis- 
sion to the order has in the most modern ship become 
still more necessary than ever before because the indi- 
vidual man'is more isolated in his duties than in former 



PSYCHOLOGY AND THE NAVY, 243 

times. He does not know what is going on in the bat- 
tle, he does not see the others, he cannot understand 
the situation, he cannot lose a moment of time to find 
out what is going on, he simply has to obey his orders 
as long as life flickers in his soul. He cannot even be 
trained for this obedience in the hour of battle, because 
all training and all exercises and all maneuver neces- 
sarily eliminate the mental factor which is ultimately 
the most important in the hour of the real fight, the emo- 
tion of fear. Whether the man will carry out the 
movements which the maneuver has taught when the 
cannons not only are thundering but the balls really are 
splintering the ship depends upon the one decisive ques- 
tion of whether an obedient submission to the order of 
the superior has become an instinct for his mind. And 
here begins that complex relation to the suggestibility 
of the crew, inasmuch as the spirit of obedience itself 
is reenforced by the unified social consciousness of the 
mass, while on the other hand the obedient carrying out 
of the order disturbs the social consciousness. I say 
the spirit of obedience is in itself fostered by the in- 
creased suggestibility with its imitativeness. To be 
obedient is the common function of all the men. They 
feel themselves as parts of that one unified organic 
fighting machine which can fulfill its purpose only if 
strict discipline controls it, and the willingness to sub- 
mit therefore becomes infectious. Hence the order of 



244 PSYCHOLOGY AND THE NAVY 

the commander is the highest duty for everyone and 
that contagious, imitative enthusiasm for the common 
cause against the enemy in every individual takes the 
form of an unquestioning spirit of subordination. The 
officer can therefore expect a much greater spirit of 
obedience from a member of that socialized group than 
from any single individual. 

But on the other hand the order goes from the com- 
mander to the man directly, and he has to fulfill his 
share without reference to what the other members of 
the crew have to do. To demand obedience to the or- 
der which is given to him individually may mean to 
force on him resistance to the suggestions of the social 
consciousness. Indeed it is no real obedience unless it 
is strong enough to break up the unified will of the 
crowd. In this sense their education toward obedience 
demands a relentless suppression of the general sug- 
gestibility. The men must be trained by real discipline 
to have control of themselves against all suggestions of 
their mates and to inhibit in their minds all merely imi- 
tative and yielding impulses. The psychologist knows 
no other way of training such a power of self-control 
but by a persistent strengthening and disciplining of the 
attention and the will. We all know how much this 
self-discipline is weakened by the corrupting indulgence 
with which our modern age coddles the youth. We 
know how a pseudo-education which is controlled by 



PSYCHOLOGY AND THE NAVY 245 

fads and fancies fosters those go as you please methods 
which yield to the whims and likings of the petted boys 
and girls and how this pampered youth learns an abun- 
dance of scattered bits of knowledge but fails to learn 
what alone makes life worth living, the power of atten- 
tion and will which enforces the dutiful action against 
all temptations. The result is the superficiality of our 
public life with the lack of resistance to sensational and 
hysterical influences. Our whole modern world in- 
stinctively longs again for thoroughness and discipline 
and the teaching of obedience. But the army and navy 
at least never lessen the firm grip of authority, and 
every officer ought to understand the mental conditions 
under which discipline can be developed. One psycho- 
logical consideration must stand in the foreground. 
Discipline is the product of habit and habit cannot be- 
come deep-rooted where any exceptions are admitted. 
Habits result from the physiological law that the un- 
interrupted repetition of actions transforms the nervous 
path into a path of less and less resistance. The sub- 
mission to the order given and the faithful performance 
of the duty in spite of all counter stimulations must be 
secured by such habituation of the brain paths. We 
cannot expect that the man will be always ready to play 
the hero and to force his energies to a maximum and to 
make great sacrifices in order to be obedient. The 
routine effect of a strong discipline can be reached only 



246 PSYCHOLOGY AND THE NAVY 

if this submission has become so habitual that it works 
as a matter of course without any need of excessive ef- 
fort. The service must have made the man an exact 
machine which works automatically whenever the order 
reaches his consciousness. 

Yet the true meaning of military discipline would be 
entirely missed if automatic obedience were considered 
as the only important demand and if another postulate 
were neglected which stands in every respect coordi- 
nate, the demand for a spirit of initiative. Without this 
spirit the fighter would become a slave and no nation 
can rely on its moral slaves. Initiative does not stand 
in a psychological contradiction to obedience. On the 
contrary even the training in obedience demands a back- 
ground of initiative, as the overcoming of the resistance 
will be successful only if every single act of submission 
is supported by a feeling of confidence and reliance in 
the leader and this reliance, however much it may result 
from the imitative crowd consciousness, remains ulti- 
mately an act of personality and initiative. But the 
spontaneity which the service has to develop in every 
man must go far beyond this mere internal free option 
for a leader. The commander controls a well-disci- 
plined crew only if he can know that every man is ready 
to give orders in the spirit of the whole to himself when 
orders from above are lacking. Every man in the crew 
must be able and must be conscious of his ability to step 



PSYCHOLOGY AND THE NAVY 247 

into a position of responsibility. His intelligence and 
power of decision accordingly demand as much stimu- 
lation as his habit of submission. It is this which en- 
nobles the modern navy and gives to it values far be- 
yond those of a mere mechanical fighting machine. The 
idea is widespread that different views are possible on 
this question, that some nations do not believe in the in- 
itiative of the individuals because they are afraid that it 
will interfere with obedience and think that the auto- 
matic, machine-like functioning of the crew ought to be 
the ideal. For instance it is a widespread belief among 
the officers of the American navy that this contrast of 
view characterizes the difference between the American' 
and the German navy, the Americans believing in the 
spirit of initiative, the Germans in the spirit of obedi- 
ence. Would it not be misleading to awake the im- 
pression that an American naval officer undervalues the 
importance of obedience? After a serious study of 
this problem with reference to the German navy, I feel 
convinced that it is equally misleading to fancy that 
the leading men of the German navy believe less in the 
absolute value of the spirit of initiative in the navy than 
the Americans. I should rather say that the develop- 
ment of the last twenty years, as it is reflected in the 
German navy literature and in the spirit of the German 
navy officers, finds its real center in the persistent effort 
to create a strong sense of initiative and of individual 



248 PSYCHOLOGY AND THE NAVY 

responsibility and personal freedom in every man who 
is to fight on board of the cruiser. Initiative and obe- 
dience ought to belong together in the psychology of 
the naval man the world over. 

We have spoken so far only of the psychology which 
the officer ought to know in order to understand his 
subordinates, but we have not spoken of the psychology 
of the officer himself. What are the significant features 
of his mind? To a certain degree, to be sure, he is not 
only in the same boat; he is also of the same mold of 
mind. He too is a part of that compact unity with its 
social consciousness and its increased suggestibility, 
sharing the common enthusiasm and sharing the com- 
mon fears, and above all he too must combine the spirit 
of obedience with the spirit of initiative, however much 
the obedience is shaded into an intelligent carrying out 
of instructions as against the mechanical fulfillment of 
orders and the initiative is heightened to a sense of 
responsibility toward every man on board and toward 
the nation. But in so far as the officer stands detached 
from the crew, the mental characteristics which are 
necessary for him are to a high degree dependent upon 
those psychological conditions of the crew. If the men 
are a suggestible mass, it is he who needs the power of 
suggestion. He must train in himself and develop to 
highest efficiency that unwavering firmness which over- 
whelms an easily impressed crowd and forces on it the 



PSYCHOLOGY AND THE NAVY 249 

will of the leader. If the officer shows signs of hesi- 
tation and of weak willingness to yield, lack of de- 
termination or erratic fluctuation, his influence is par- 
alyzed. Only the man of suggestive power can stop a 
panic by one short word or one vivid movement, and 
by one gesture can transform fear into daring courage. 
Such suggestive power must draw its strength from 
autosuggestion. An officer who allows himself to grow 
tired by the monotony of the service or by the exhaust- 
ing work on board, or who becomes nervous or fussy 
or irritated, or who instinctively shrinks from the re- 
sponsibility and always waits for the counsel of others, 
slowly loses the autosuggestive hold on himself which 
is even more important than any knowledge. What- 
ever he can do to strengthen his nervous system, to 
enrich his intellect, to widen his horizon, to keep his in- 
stincts vigorous and his imagination vivid, his inspira- 
tions high and his will decisions quick, all ought to con- 
tribute to that reliance on himself which strengthens the 
power of his autosuggestive thought. Only then is he 
a true commander and leader. The difficulties which 
he has to overcome are multifold, as the conditions and 
the strain of the service work strongly toward automa- 
tization of his mental life, and this means a weaken- 
ing of that power of command with its independent 
self-reliance and its need for inexhaustible autosugges- 
tion. He has to overcome the resistance by sport and 



2 5 o PSYCHOLOGY AND THE NAVY- 

training, by social comradery with his equals, by joy 
in the service as such, by intellectual interest in his du- 
ties and by passionate love for his task, but above all 
by a systematic training of his will power. 

This emphasis on the emotional traits of the leader 
does not contradict the demand which seems paramount 
in a war college, the training of abilities. However 
much an officer may have learned concerning ships and 
guns and ammunition, and even concerning the history 
of warfare, the knowledge alone does not prepare him 
for the great work which he is called to perform for 
the good of the nation in peace and in war. The de- 
velopment of abilities such as have to be shown in the 
movements of the fleet or in the battle is dependent 
upon mental activities for which no mere knowledge 
can be substituted. They stand much nearer to art 
than to knowledge. We find this contrast in every 
field of human interests. The youngest pupil in a 
school has to gather some information and has to learn 
facts accessible to knowledge, and on the other hand 
has to win and exercise abilities. His power to read 
or to write or to calculate demands actual performance 
and can never be gained by mere theoretical demon- 
stration. This doubleness remains the same through 
all stages of schooling up to highest technical and pro- 
fessional preparations for lifework. The surgeon must 
learn his knowledge of medicine and exercise his abil- 



PSYCHOLOGY AND THE NAVY 251 

ity to perform the operation. Yet these abilities which 
have to be acquired are acts of our minds and nervous 
systems. It is not necessary to train them on exactly 
those objects for which they are finally to be used. The 
only essential requirement is that really the same 
mental and physiological functions be involved which 
are needed in the decisive hour. To go through a real 
battle would be an impossible preparation. To go 
through a maneuver is of course only an approach, as 
every sham battle leaves out the real hatred of the en- 
emy and therefore changes the final mental situation. 
But even such maneuvers with actual ships go far be- 
yond what the routine training can bring to the indi- 
vidual officer. Hence he is obliged to reduce the 
mental situation still more and to substitute a naval war 
game and the mastery of theoretical naval war problems 
of actual warfare for the genuine fight. But if these 
miniature battles and these schematized wars of the col- 
lege room are well arranged, they can become a sub- 
stitute in which the most essential mental functions of 
warfare are actually exercised. The psychologist can- 
not too earnestly advise that emphasis be laid on such 
practical exercises. The training in all our technical 
activities from writing with a pen to mastering a musi- 
cal instrument or a scientific apparatus demonstrates in 
ever new forms that the mere ability to go through 
the component acts of a complex action is not sufficient 



2 5 2 PSYCHOLOGY AND THE NAVY 

to guarantee success in the complex action itself. We 
must always consider the synthesizing of the part actions 
as a task in itself which needs independent training. 
An officer may have learned to do this and to do that 
and to respond to one condition in this and to another 
condition in that way, but he can never feel himself pre- 
pared for the right decision and right performance in 
the unified complex situation of the battle, if he has not 
thoroughly trained himself in responding to the whole 
complexity of the situation. In every complex activity 
the whole is endlessly more than the mere sum of the 
parts, and this is conditioned by the hierarchic structure 
of our psychophysical system. The various layers of 
psychophysical units one higher than the other have to 
take charge of the organization of our motor responses. 
In the first few weeks the man who is learning teleg- 
raphy only tries as quickly as possible to give the sig- 
nals for the single letters and the curve of his speed 
shows a steady ascendance until he knows how to pro- 
duce the single letter with the greatest possible speed. 
Then he reaches a period of standstill, until he is fully 
trained in this elementary ability, but afterward he 
enters into the second stage of training and learns to 
telegraph not letters but whole words and his speed in 
telegraphy quickly rises. In this second period he 
learns to synthesize the motor impulses for the single 
letters into complex movement innervations for whole 



PSYCHOLOGY AND THE NAVY, 253 

words. This new ability is acquired after several 
months and then begins again a time of standstill. 
Finally he reaches the period of acquiring the highest 
ability, not accessible to everyone, namely the synthe- 
sizing of the word impulses into still more complex ac- 
tivities in which one motor stroke gives the impulse for 
the telegraphing of a whole phrase composed of sev- 
eral words. In this way the officer must learn to syn- 
thesize the thousand partial activities which he has 
learned as factors of the naval service. He needs ex- 
ercise in that whole very complex setting from which 
the special actions then spring with automatic necessity. 
While in this way ability must be developed in oppo- 
sition to mere knowledge, it is not fair to underestimate 
the knowledge. There are some who claim that such 
ability is instinct and that instinctive activities are es- 
sentially dependent upon inborn powers. The right 
commander sees by intuition what he must do in the 
decisive moment. He has not even time to consider 
deliberately what possibilities are open, but with in- 
stinctive certainty he chooses the right one. This is 
perfectly true and yet entirely false. What we call 
our instinct in such cases is not an inborn disposition like 
that for satisfying hunger or thirst; it is nothing but an 
ability to respond to the complex stimulus without a con- 
scious awareness of the special steps which lead to the 
end. But in order to gain such an instinctive ability, 



254 PSYCHOLOGY AND THE NAVY 

the connections must have been formed by persistent 
exercises into which perfectly conscious intentions and 
careful knowledge and learning have entered. The 
piano virtuoso plays without being conscious of the 
particular movements which at first had to be slowly 
learned. We all write and we all speak instinctively 
without choosing the special words or the special writ- 
ing movements, but we had to learn them by slow 
study. Everything which we acquire through assidu- 
ous learning to-day has a chance of being transformed 
to-morrow into instinctive behavior which serves the 
ends without our being conscious of the steps which lead 
to them. It is a kind of mental abbreviation, a short- 
cut which can never be reached without industry and 
patience. The officer who devotes faithful years of 
study perhaps to the history of naval warfare and 
earnestly thinks himself into the situation of every de- 
cisive battle forms connections in his mind between the 
ideas of certain situations and the ideas of certain neces- 
sary responses and reactions which slowly become part 
of his instinctive behavior and actions. 

We have said that every pupil in a school and every 
student in a profession has to learn knowledge and has 
to acquire abilities. But the aim of education could 
never be reached by those two ways alone. A third 
factor is necessary to complete the meaning of the 
school. Interests must be stimulated. Knowledge 



PSYCHOLOGY AND THE NAVY 255 

and abilities would be dead and useless unless a living in- 
terest stood behind them. Even the smallest child must 
have at least the interest of curiosity or of sympathy, 
and on a higher level we stimulate the logical and eth- 
ical and aesthetic interests in order to prepare the youth 
for a valuable lifework. The interest which guides 
the scholar is not that which fascinates the artist, and 
the interest which impels the physician is not that which 
stimulates the lawyer, and the interest which inspires the 
minister is not that which stirs the statesman. But 
there is no calling high or humble in which an emo- 
tional interest does not give force and meaning to the 
knowledge and abilities of the man. The knowledge 
and the ability of the naval officer, the one resulting 
from the intellectual functions of his mind, the other 
from the volitional powers of his mind would indeed 
be deprived of their real efficiency and value unless a 
strong, deep stream of interest flowed from the emo- 
tions of his mind. These interests may be of many 
kinds. But it holds true of every vocation that many 
motives are intertwined in the mind. The surgeon is 
anxious to receive his fees in order to earn his liveli- 
hood, and this mercenary motive is combined with the 
social one of his ambition to have a respected name in 
the community for his professional work, and both mo- 
tives are combined with the intellectual one of a serious 
interest in the scientific problems of his medical work, 



256 PSYCHOLOGY AND THE NAVY 

and yet even these three groups of motives would never 
make him a true physician and would never inspire him 
enough for the great tasks which he may have to per- 
form at a bedside if there were not the ethical motive 
of the desire to help suffering mankind. In a similar 
way we may disentangle personal and social and ideal- 
istic motive elements in every vocation, but in none 
does their cooperation seem more important than in the 
mental structure of the naval officer. Of course there 
must be personal motives involved. The officer must 
think of earning his livelihood, of filling an honorable 
position, of advancing as quickly as possible in his 
career. But motives on a much higher level, motives 
which do not refer to the individual as such but to ideal 
aims and purposes must be intimately associated with 
the personal ones. He must feel joy in the service as 
such, he must have interest in the details of the work 
and in the problems which it offers, he must be de- 
termined by a consciousness of duty which gives him 
perfect satisfaction when he is loyal to his task, what- 
ever sacrifices it may demand. Yet here again we must 
insist that even all these motives of a higher order are 
not sufficient to guarantee the ideal perfection of the 
officer's achievement. There must be one motive 
which is still deeper rooted and which lies far beyond 
mere personal consideration. What is needed as the 
central energy in the mind of the naval officer is an en- 



PSYCHOLOGY AND THE NAVY 257 

thusiastic belief in the ideal value of the navy and the 
task of the navy. The teacher can never give his best 
if he is not inspired by the ideal belief in the incom- 
parable value of educating the youth. The artist and 
the scholar cannot create works of lasting glory if they 
do not live in an unquestioning belief in the sacred mis- 
sion of beauty and truth. The minister cannot be a 
true preacher if pure religion is not the center of his 
soul. Such a belief, such an inspiration, such a reli- 
gion, must penetrate and fill the mind of the officer. 
With every fiber of his personality he must feel that it 
is sacred work to which he is called, that the mission of 
the navy is an ideal one and that the honor of the coun- 
try is not too dearly paid for by his death. The psy- 
chologist sees in all these demands for the highest 
unselfish motives not simply beautiful phrases and roman- 
tic illusions. Even though he abstracts from the higher 
moral aspect and simply takes the standpoint of descrip- 
tion and explanation, he must acknowledge that such an 
emotional belief is the strongest reservoir of the ener- 
gies for psychophysical action. The teacher and the 
minister, the artist and the scholar, and with them the 
officer, may perform every single activity which is 
needed for their lifework by the mere interplay of ideas, 
by learning and training. But in every case the avail- 
able power for activity would easily be exhausted. 
Any friction would interfere with the possible success, 



2 5 8 PSYCHOLOGY AND THE NAVY 

any selfish desire would inhibit the impulses, fatigue 
would weaken the work, chance distractions and temp- 
tations would lead to side activities. Wherever one 
great emotional motive synthesizes the lifework, the 
psychophysical energy can overcome those frictions and 
those temptations, those selfish motives, those difficul- 
ties and dangers. This is true of the mind of the 
masses as well as of the individuals. The maximum 
effort and the faithful endurance through the hour of 
danger presupposes that high-pitched tension for which 
mere intellectual processes can never be a substitute. 
The psychologist therefore, without any emotionalism 
on his part but for strictly scientific reasons must de- 
mand that every factor be inhibited which interferes 
with a whole-hearted surrender to the sacredness of 
the naval cause. 

The daily routine work may easily be carried on by 
officers and men who lack this belief, and the smooth- 
ness of their performance may deceive the world con- 
cerning the perfunctory character of their service. The 
interference with this ultimately decisive attitude may 
result from many conditions. Among the bluejackets 
a great mental inhibition may come from the tendency 
to change the vocation. English observers seem to be- 
lieve that here lies the central mental difficulty of the 
American navy, since it must be acknowledged that in 
no other country are the rank and file of the population 



PSYCHOLOGY AND THE NAVY, 259 

so easily inclined to change from one vocation to an- 
other. The minds of the officers on the other hand are 
perhaps most easily harmed by what has often been 
called the spirit of the steamyachtsman. The steam- 
yachtsman danger is psychologically especially grave, 
because it so easily creeps in without at first allowing 
anyone to perceive the difference between the right and 
the wrong attitude. The steamyachtsman loves the 
ship and its handling, enjoys the life on the 
water, is deeply interested in all naval move- 
ments ; and yet the whole setting of his mind is funda- 
mentally wrong for the officer who has to prepare him- 
self and his men for the heroic work in the crisis. It 
is a spirit of ease and comfort, of charming hospitality 
and delightful companionship, of self-satisfaction and 
goodnatured sportsmanship. In many a foreign navy 
the true believers in sea power dislike for this reason to 
see too many rich officers in the service, as their 
spirit of comfort and relaxation spreads this steam- 
yachtsman attitude. There are not a few who believe 
that this difference alone was the real reason for the 
victory of the Japanese navy in which such a steam- 
yachtsman element does not exist over the Russian navy 
in which it is said to be widespread. But the social 
psychologist cannot overlook a still more dangerous 
rock which is threatening under the surface. The 
whole civilized world is to-day filled not only with the 



2 6o PSYCHOLOGY AND THE NAVY 

old vague wish for peace, but with a more modern con- 
viction that means can be found to secure peace and to 
make war superfluous. The American nation is among 
the leaders in this international movement and no edu- 
cated man has a right to close his eyes to this tremen- 
dous problem of civilization. But just because it is ap- 
pealing to an ideal demand and carries with it the prom- 
ises of highest humanity, it is much more dangerous to 
the inner unity of the officer's mind than a mere appeal 
to comfort and selfishness. The mind of the war- 
rior is thrown into a conflict between the demands of 
his lifework and the siren voices of the eternal peace 
advocates. How can the enthusiastic belief in the pre- 
paredness for war and in the relentlessness of the fight 
prevail in a mind which is touched by the doubt whether 
war among civilized nations is not brutal and immoral 
and criminal. It is one of the most important condi- 
tions for the success of the navy that such inner waver- 
ing be absolutely excluded from the officer's mind. He 
is not for that purpose obliged to fall back to a barbaric 
hatred of the enemy with the mere longing to kill, nor 
has he to narrow his horizon and ignorantly to ignore 
those international peace movements. All that is 
needed is for him to see them in the right perspective. 
He will not cleny the harm and the losses which war 
brings with it. But at the same time he will be deeply 
impressed by the tremendous moral power of a national 



PSYCHOLOGY AND THE NAVY 261 

self-defense which concentrates the energies of the 
whole nation in loyalty to its historical mission. He 
must grasp the fundamental role of war in the history 
of mankind as the great vehicle of progress, as the great 
eradicator of egotism, as the great educator to a spirit 
of sacrifice and duty. Moreover he must recognize 
how the state forms in which mankind has developed 
have been bound up with national rivalry and war, and 
how our present age in spite of its palace of interna- 
tional arbitration at The Hague seems further removed 
from warlessness than many a previous period. And 
as soon as he has recognized that war is necessary and 
as soon as he has chosen to serve the nation for its mil- 
itary work, no argument against war ought to interfere 
with the unified setting of his loyal mind. A scholar 
may be convinced that the poet's imagination is a noble 
gift for the artist; and yet he must not allow himself to 
be carried away or even to be touched by this longing 
for imaginative flight when he is on the path of schol- 
arship. The minister may be convinced that there is 
high value in the materialistic work of the naturalist; 
and yet his religious attitude must not be shaken by the 
demand for a godless universe. The ideals of the ar- 
tist and of the scholar and of the preacher, of the peace 
reformer and of the warrior are all true ideals, are each 
worthy to give meaning and significance to the life which 
is devoted to them. But this significance and this 



262 PSYCHOLOGY AND THE NAVY 

meaning ultimately lie in the devotion, and the deepest 
value is therefore lost if the faithful belief in any of 
these ideals is choked by rival ideals. There is no fit- 
ness to win without unity of mind and certainty of pur- 
pose. 



THE END 



MAY 10 WW 






